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THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP 




BOOKS BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN 


THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS 

THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE 

THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP 

IMPERIAL GERMANY 

AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

THE NATURE OF PEACE 

AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION 

THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA 

THE VESTED INTERESTS AND THE 
STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS 

THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN MODERN 
CIVILISATION 

THE ENGINEERS AND THE PRICE SYSTEM 


THE INSTINCT OF 
WORKMANSHIP 

And the State of the Industrial Arts 


BY 

THORSTEIN VEBLEN 

i t 

i i 



NEW YORK 

B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 


MCMXXII 




* y 7 * 

vua 


x 

o' 



COPYRIGHT 1914 
By the Macmillan Company 
All rights reserved . 

Published March, 1914. 

New edition published by B. W. Huebsch, July, 1918. 
Reprinted October, 1922 






A. 




illg 






V 






TO 

B K N 












PREFACE 


The following essay attempts an analysis of such cor¬ 
relation a-s is visible between industrial use and wont and 
those other institutional facts that go to make up any 
given phase of civilisation. It is assumed that in the 
growth of culture, as in its current maintenance, the 
facts of technological use and wont are fundamental and 
definitive, in the sense that they underlie and condition 
the scope and method of civilisation in other than the 
technological respect, but not in such a sense as to pre¬ 
clude or overlook the degree in which these other con¬ 
ventions of any given civilisation in their turn react on 
the state of the industrial arts. 

The analysis proceeds on the materialistic assumptions 
of modern science, but without prejudice to the underly¬ 
ing question as to the ulterior competency of this ma¬ 
terialistic conception considered as a metaphysical tenet. 
The inquiry simply accepts these mechanistic assump¬ 
tions of material science for the purpose in hand, since 
these afford the currently acceptable terms of solution 
for any scientific problem of the kind in the present state 
of preconceptions on this head. 

As should appear from its slight bulk, the essay is of 
the nature of a cursory survey rather than an exhaustive 
inquiry with full documentation. The few references 
given and the authorities cited in the course of the argu¬ 
ment are accordingly not to be taken as an inclusive 

• • 
vu 


Preface 


• * • 
vm 

presentation of the materials on which the inquiry rests. 
It will also be remarked that where authoritative docu¬ 
ments are cited the citation is general and extensive 
rather than specific and detailed. Wherever detailed 
references are given they will be found to bear on specific 
facts brought into the argument by way of illustrative 
detail. 



CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 


Introductory 


CHAPTER II 

Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 

CHAPTER III 

The Savage State of the Industrial Arts . 

CHAPTER IV 

The Technology of the Predatory Culture 

■ 1 M’ *■■•*•■* 

CHAPTER V 

Ownership and the Competitive System 

CHAPTER VI 

The Era of Handicraft . . . . 

CHAPTER VII 

The Machine Industry . .... 


PAGE 
. i 

• 38 

. 103 

. 138 

. 187 

. 231 

. 299 


IX 



















































































THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP 










THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP 


CHAPTER I 
Introductory 

For mankind as for the other higher animals, the life 
of the species is conditioned by the complement of in¬ 
stinctive proclivities and tropismatic aptitudes with 
which the species is typically endowed. Not only is the 
continued life of the race dependent on the adequacy of 
its instinctive proclivities in this way, but the routine 
and details of its life are also, in the last resort, deter¬ 
mined by these instincts. These are the prime movers in 
human behaviour, as in the behaviour of all those animals 
that show self-direction or discretion. Human activity, 
in so far as it can be spoken of as conduct, can never 
exceed the scope of these instinctive dispositions, by 

initiative of which man takes action. Nothing falls 

✓ 

within the human scheme of things desirable to be done 
except what answers to these native proclivities of man. 
These native proclivities alone make anything worth 
while, and out of their working emerge not only the 
purpose and efficiency of life, but its substantial pleas¬ 
ures and pains as well. 

Latterly the words “instinct” and “instinctive” are 
no longer well seen among students of those biological 

i 


2 The Instinct of Workmanship 

sciences where they once had a great vogue. Students 
who occupy themselves with the psychology of animal 
behaviour are cautiously avoiding these expressions, and 
in this caution they are doubtless well advised. For 
such use the word appears no longer to be serviceable as 
a technical term. It has lost the requisite sharp defini¬ 
tion and consistency of connotation, apparently through 
disintegration under a more searching analysis than the 
phenomena comprised under this concept had previously 
been subjected to. In these biological sciences interest 
is centering not on the question of what activities may 
be set down to innate propensity or predisposition at 
large, but rather on the determination of the irreducible 
psychological—and, indeed, physiological—elements that 
go to make up animal behaviour. For this purpose 
“instinct” is a concept of too lax and shifty a definition 
to meet the demands of exact biological science. 

For the sciences that deal with the psychology of 
human conduct a similarly searching analysis of the 
elementary facts of behaviour is doubtless similarly de¬ 
sirable; and under such closer scrutiny of these facts it 
will doubtless appear that here, too, the broad term 
“instinct” is of too unprecise a character to serve the 
needs of an exhaustive psychological analysis. But the 
needs of an inquiry into the nature and causes of the 
growth of institutions are not precisely the same as those 
of such an exhaustive psychological analysis. A genetic 
inquiry into institutions will address itself to the growth 
of habits and conventions, as conditioned by the ma¬ 
terial environment and by the innate and persistent 
propensities of human nature; and for these propensities, 
as they take effect in the give and take of cultural growth, 



Introductory 


3 

no better designation than the time-worn “instinct” is 
available. 

In the light of recent inquiries and speculations it is 
scarcely to be questioned that each of these distinguish¬ 
able propensities may be analysed into simpler constit¬ 
uent elements, of a quasi-tropismatic or physiological 
nature ; 1 but in the light of every-day experience and 
common notoriety it is at the same time not to be ques¬ 
tioned that these simple and irreducible psychological 
elements of human behaviour fall into composite func¬ 
tional groups, and so make up specific and determinate 
propensities, proclivities, aptitudes that are, within the 
purview of the social sciences, to be handled as irreducible 
traits of human nature. Indeed, it would appear that 
it is in the particular grouping and concatenation of 
these ultimate psychological elements into characteristic 
lines of interest and propensity that the nature of man 
is finally to be distinguished from that of the lower 
animals. 

These various native proclivities that are so classed 
together as “instincts” have the characteristic in com¬ 
mon that they all and several, more or less imperatively, 
propose an objective end of endeavour. On the other 
hand what distinguishes one instinct from another is 
that each sets up a characteristic purpose, aim, or object 
to be attained, different from the objective end of any 
other instinct. Instinctive action is teleological, con¬ 
sciously so, and the teleological scope and aim of each 
instinctive propensity differs characteristically from all 
the rest. The several instincts are teleological categories, 

1 Cf. Jacques Loeb, Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Com - 
paratvie Psychology , ch. i. 


4 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


and are, in colloquial usage, distinguished and classed 
on the ground of their teleological content. As the term 
is here used, therefore, and indeed as it is currently under¬ 
stood, the instincts are to be defined or described neither 
in mechanical terms of those anatomical or physiological 
aptitudes that causally underlie them or that come into 
action in the functioning of any given instinct, nor in 
terms of the movements of orientation or taxis involved 
in the functioning of each. The distinctive feature by 
the mark of which any given instinct is identified is to 
be found in the particular character of the purpose to 
which it drives . 1 “Instinct,” as contra-distinguished 
from tropismatic action, involves consciousness and 
adaptation to an end aimed at. 

It is, of course, not hereby intended to set up or to 
prescribe a definition of “instinct” at large, but only to 
indicate as closely as may be what sense is attached to 
the term as here used. At the same time it is believed 
that this definition of the concept does violence neither 
to colloquial usage nor to the usage of such students as 
have employed the term in scientific discussion, particu¬ 
larly in discussion of the instinctive proclivities of man¬ 
kind. But it is not to be overlooked that this definition 
of the term may be found inapplicable, or at least of 
doubtful service, when applied to those simpler and more 
immediate impulses that are sometimes by tradition 
spoken of as “instinctive,” even in human behaviour,— 
impulses that might with better effect be designated 

1 Cf. W. James, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxiv and xxv, where, how¬ 
ever, the difference between tropism and instinct is not kept well in 
hand,—the tropisms having at that date not been subjected to inquiry 
and definition as has been true since then; William McDougall, Introduc¬ 
tion to Social Psychology , ch. i. 


Introductory 


5 


“tropismatic.” In animal behaviour, for instance, as 
well as in such direct and immediate impulsive human 
action as is fairly to be classed with animal behaviour, 
it is often a matter of some perplexity to draw a line 
between tropismatic activity and instinct. Notoriously, 
the activities commonly recognised as instinctive differ 
widely among themselves in respect of the degree of 
directness or immediacy with which the given response 
to stimulus takes place. They range in this respect all 
the way from such reactions as are doubtfully to be dis¬ 
tinguished from simple reflex action on the one hand, to 
such as are doubtfully recognised as instinctive because 
of the extent to which reflection and deliberation enter 
into their execution on the other hand. By insensible 
gradation the lower (less complex and deliberate) instinc¬ 
tive activities merge into the class of unmistakable tropis¬ 
matic sensibilities, without its being practicable to deter¬ 
mine by any secure test where the one category should 
be declared to end and the other to begin . 1 Such quasi- 
tropismatic activities may be rated as purposeful by 
an observer, in the sense that they are seen to further 
the life of the individual agent or of the species, while 
there is no consciousness of purpose on the part of the 
agent under observation; whereas “instinct,” in the 
narrower and special sense to which it seems desirable to 
restrict the term for present use, denotes the conscious 
pursuit of an objective end which the instinct in ques¬ 
tion makes worth while. 

The ends of life, then, the purposes to be achieved, are 
assigned by man’s instinctive proclivities; but the ways 

1 Loeb, Comparative Physiology of the Brain, pp. 177-178. 


6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

and means of accomplishing those things which the in¬ 
stinctive proclivities so make worth while are a matter 
of intelligence. It is a distinctive mark of mankind that 
the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the race 
is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by 
the other animals. But the dependence of the race on 
its endowment of instincts is no less absolute for this 
intervention of intelligence; since it is only by the prompt¬ 
ing of instinct that reflection and deliberation come to 
be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope 
and method of intelligence in all this employment of 
it. (Men take thought, but the human spirit, that is to 
say the racial endowment of instinctive proclivities, 
decides what they shall take thought of, and how and to 
what effect. 

Yet the dependence of the scheme of life on the com¬ 
plement of instinctive proclivities hereby becomes less 
immediate, since a more or less extended logic of ways 
and means comes to intervene between the instinctively 
given end and its realisation; and the lines of relation 
between any given instinctive proclivity and any par¬ 
ticular feature of human conduct are by so much the 
more devious and round-about and the more difficult 
to trace. The higher the degree of intelligence and the 
larger the available body of knowledge current in any 
given community, the more extensive and elaborate will 
be the logic of ways and means interposed between these 
impulses and their realisation, and the more multifarious 
and complicated will be the apparatus of expedients and 
resources employed to compass those ends that are in¬ 
stinctively worth while. 

This apparatus of ways and means available for the 


Introductory 


7 


pursuit of whatever may be worth seeking is, substan¬ 
tially all, a matter of tradition out of the past, a legacy 
of habits of thought accumulated through the experience 
of past generations. So that the manner, and in a great 
degree the measure, in which the instinctive ends of life 
are worked out under any given cultural situation is 
somewhat closely conditioned by these elements of habit, 
which so fall into shape as an accepted scheme of life. 
The instinctive proclivities are essentially simple and 
look directly to the attainment of some concrete objec¬ 
tive end; but in detail the ends so sought are many and 
diverse, and the ways and means by which they may be 
sought are similarly diverse and various, involving end¬ 
less recourse to expedients, adaptations, and concessive 
adjustment between several proclivities that are all suf¬ 
ficiently urgent. 

Under the discipline of habituation this logic and ap¬ 
paratus of ways and means falls into conventional lines, 
acquires the consistency of custom and prescription, 
and so takes on an institutional character and force. 
The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only 
become an habitual matter of course, easy and obvious, 
but they come likewise to be sanctioned by social conven¬ 
tion, and so become right and proper and give rise to 
principles of conduct. By use and wont they are incor¬ 
porated into the current scheme of common sense. As 
elements of the approved scheme of conduct and pursuit 
these conventional ways and means take their place as 
proximate ends of endeavour. Whence, in the further 
course of unremitting habituation, as the attention is 
habitually focussed on these proximate ends, they occupy 
the interest to such an extent as commonly to throw their 


8 The Instinct of Workmanship 

K 

own ulterior purpose into the background and often 
let it be lost sight of; as may happen, for instance, in the 
acquisition and use of money. It follows that in much 
of human conduct these proximate ends alone are present 
in consciousness as the object of interest and the goal of 
endeavour, and certain conventionally accepted ways 
and means come to be set up as definitive principles of 
what is right and good; while the ulterior purpose of it 
all is only called to mind occasionally, if at all, as an 
afterthought, by an effort of reflection. 1 

Among psychologists who have busied themselves with 
these questions there has hitherto been no large measure 
of agreement as to the number of specific instinctive 
proclivities that so are native to man; nor is there any 
agreement as to the precise functional range and content 
ascribed to each. In a loose way it is apparently taken 
for granted that these instincts are to be conceived as 
discrete and specific elements in human nature, each 
working out its own determinate functional content 
without greatly blending with or being diverted by the 
working of its neighbours in that spiritual complex into 
which they all enter as constituent elements. 2 For the 
purposes of an exhaustive psychological analysis it is 
doubtless expedient to make the most of such discrete¬ 
ness as is observable among the instinctive proclivities. 
But for an inquiry into the scope and method of their 
working-out in the growth of institutions it is perhaps 
even more to the purpose to take note of how and with 

1 Cf. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics , especially ch. i. 

2 Cf., e. g., James, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxiv; William Mc- 
Dougall, Introduction to Social Psychology , ch. iii. 


Introductory g 

A *.■ 

what effect the several instinctive proclivities cross, 
blend, overlap, neutralise or reenforce one another. 

The most convincing genetic view of these phenomena 
throws the instinctive proclivities into close relation 
with the tropismatic sensibilities and brings them, in the 
physiological respect, into the same general class with 
the latter. 1 If taken uncritically and in general terms 
this view would seem to carry the implication that the 
instincts should be discrete and discontinuous among 
themselves somewhat after the same fashion as the tropis¬ 
matic sensibilities with which they are in great measure 
bound up; but on closer scrutiny such a genetic theory of 
the instincts does not appear to enforce the view that 
they are to be conceived as effectually discontinuous 
or mutually exclusive, though it may also not involve 
the contrary,—that they make a continuous or am¬ 
biguously segmented body of spiritual elements. The 
recognised tropisms stand out, to all appearance, as 
sharply defined physiological traits, transmissible by 
inheritance intact and unmodified, separable and un¬ 
blended, in a manner suggestively like the “unit char¬ 
acters” spoken of in latter day theories of heredity. 2 

1 Loeb, Comparative Physiology of the Brain , especially ch. xiii. 

2 It is of course only as physiological traits that the tropisms are con¬ 
ceived not to overlap, blend or interfere, and it is likewise only in respect 
of their physiological discontinuity that the like argument would bear 
on the instincts. In respect of their expression, in the way of orientation, 
movement, growth, secretion, and the like, the tropismatic response to 
dissimilar stimuli is often so apparently identical that expert investigators 
have at times been at a loss to decide to which one of two or several 
recognised tropismatic sensibilities a given motor response should be 
ascribed. But in respect of their ultimate physiological character, the 
intimate physiological process by which the given sensibility takes effect, 
the response due to different tropismatic sensibilities appears in each case 


10 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


While the instinctive sensibilities may not be explained 
as derivatives of the tropisms, there is enough of simi¬ 
larity in the working of the two to suggest that the two 
classes of phenomena must both be accounted for on 
somewhat similar physiological grounds. The simple 
and more narrowly defined instinctive dispositions, which 
have much of the appearance of immediate reflex nervous 
action and automatically defined response, lend them¬ 
selves passably to such an interpretation,—as, for ex¬ 
ample, the gregarious instinct, or the instinct of repulsion 
with its accompanying emotion of disgust. Such as 
these are shared by mankind with the other higher 
animals on a fairly even footing; and these are relatively 
simple, immediate, and not easily sophisticated or offset 
by habit. These seem patently to be of much the same 
nature as the tropismatic sensibilities; though even in 
these simpler instinctive dispositions the characteristic 
quasi-tropismatic sensibility distinctive of each appears 
to be complicated with obscure stimulations of the nerve 
centres arising out of the functioning of one or another 
of the viscera. And what is true of the simpler instincts 
in this respect should apply to the vaguer and more com¬ 
plex instincts also, but with a larger allowance for a more 
extensive complication of visceral and organic stimuli. 

Whether these subconscious stimulations of the nerve 
centres through the functioning of the viscera are to be 
conceived in terms of tropismatic reaction is a difficult 
question which has had little attention hitherto. But in 
any case, whatever the expert students of these phenom¬ 
ena may have to say of this matter, the visceral or or- 

to be distinctive and not to blend with any other response to a different 
stimulus, with which it may happen to synchronise. 


Introductory 


ir 


ganic stimuli engaged in any one of the instinctive sensi¬ 
bilities are apparently always more than one and are 
usually somewhat complex. Indeed, while it seems super¬ 
ficially an easy matter to refer any one of the simple 
instincts directly to some certain one of the viscera as 
the main or primary source from which its appropriate 
stimulation comes to the nerve centres, it is by no means 
easy to decide what one or more of the viscera, or of the 
other organs that are not commonly classed as viscera, 
will have no part in the matter. 

It results that, on physiological grounds, the common 
run of human instincts are not to be conceived as sever¬ 
ally discrete and elementary proclivities. The same 
physiological processes enter in some measure, though 
in varying proportions, into the functioning of each. 
In instinctive action the individual acts as a whole, and 
in the conduct which emerges under the driving force 
of these instinctive dispositions the part which each 
several instinct plays is a matter of more or less, not of 
exclusive direction. They must therefore incontinently 
touch, blend, overlap and interfere, and can not be con¬ 
ceived as acting each and several in sheer isolation and 
independence of one another. The relations of give and 
take among the several instinctive dispositions, there¬ 
fore—of inosculation, “contamination” and cross pur¬ 
poses—are presumably slighter and of less consequence 
for the simpler and more apparently tropismatic impulses 
while on the other hand the less specific and vaguer in¬ 
stinctive predispositions, such as the parental bent or 
the proclivity to construction or acquisition, will be so 
comprehensively and intricately bound in a web of corre¬ 
lation and inter-dependence—will so unremittingly con- 



12 The Instinct of Workmanship 

taminate, offset or fortify one another, and have each 
so large and yet so shifting a margin of common ground 
with all the rest—that hard and fast lines of demarca¬ 
tion can scarcely be drawn between them. The best 
that can practically be had in the way of a secure defini¬ 
tion will be a descriptive characterisation of each dis¬ 
tinguishable propensity, together with an indication of 
the more salient and consequential ramifications by 
which each contaminates or is contaminated by the work¬ 
ing of other propensities that go to make up that complex 
of instinctive dispositions that constitutes the spiritual 
nature of the race. So that the schemes of definition 
that have hitherto been worked out are in great part 
to be taken as arrangements of convenience, serviceable 
apparatus for present use, rather than distinctions en¬ 
forced at all points by an equally sharp substantial dis¬ 
creteness of the facts . 1 

This fact, that in some measure the several instincts 
spring from a common ground of sentient life, that they 
each engage the individual as a whole, has serious conse¬ 
quences in the domain of habit, and therefore it counts 
for much in the growth of civilisation and in the every¬ 
day conduct of affairs. The physiological apparatus en¬ 
gaged in the functioning of any given instinct enters in 
part, though in varying measure, into the working of 
some or of any other instinct; whereby, even on physio¬ 
logical grounds alone, the habituation that touches the 
functioning of any given instinct must, in a less degree 
but pervasively, affect the habitual conduct of the same 
agent when driven by any other instinct. So that on 
this view the scope of habit, in so far as it bears on the 

1 Cf., e. g., McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology , ch. i-iii. 


Introductory 


*3 


instinctive activities, is necessarily wider than the par¬ 
ticular concrete line of conduct to which the habituation 
in question is due. 

The instincts are hereditary traits. In the current 
theories of heredity they would presumably be counted 
as secondary characteristics of the species, as being in a 
sense by-products of the physiological activities that 
give the species its specific character; since these theories 
in the last resort run in physiological terms. So the 
instinctive dispositions would scarcely be accounted unit 
characters, in the Mendelian sense, but would rather 
count as spiritual traits emerging from a certain concur¬ 
rence of physiological unit characters and varying some¬ 
what according to variations in the complement of unit 
characters to which the species or the individual may 
owe his constitution. Hence would arise variations of 
individuality among the members of the race, resting 
in some such manner as has just been suggested on 
the varying endowment of instincts, and running back 
through these finally to recondite differences of physio¬ 
logical function. Some such account of the instinctive 
dispositions and their relation to the physical individual 
seems necessary as a means of apprehending them and 
their work without assuming a sheer break between the 
physical and the immaterial phenomena of life. 

Characteristic of the race is a degree of vagueness or 
generality, an absence of automatically determinate 
response, a lack of concrete eventuality as it might be 
called, in the common run of human instincts. This 
vague and shifty character of the instincts, or perhaps 


14 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


rather of the habitual response to their incitement, is to 
be taken in connection with the breadth and variability 
of their physiological ground as spoken of above. For 
the long-term success of the race it is manifestly of the 
highest value, since it leaves a wide and facile margin of 
experimentation, habituation, invention and accommo¬ 
dation open to the sense of workmanship. At the same 
time and by the same circumstance the scope and range 
of conventionalisation and sophistication are similarly 
flexible, wide and consequential. No doubt the several 
racial stocks differ very appreciably in this respect. 

The complement of instinctive dispositions, compris¬ 
ing under that term both the native propensity and its 
appropriate sentiment, makes up what would be called 
the “spiritual nature” of man—often spoken of more 
simply as “human nature.” Without allowing it to 
imply anything like a dualism or dichotomy between 
material and immaterial phenomena, the term “spir¬ 
itual” may conveniently be so used in its colloquial 
sense. So employed it commits the discussion to no 
attitude on the question of man’s single or dual consti¬ 
tution, but simply uses the conventional expression to 
designate that complement of functions which it has by 
current usage been employed to designate. 

The human complement of instincts fluctuates from 
one individual to another in an apparently endless di¬ 
versity, varying both in the relative force of the several 
instinctive proclivities and in the scheme of co-ordination, 
coalescence or interference that prevails among them. 
This diversity of native character is noticeable among 
all peoples, though some of the peoples of the lower 
cultures show a notable approach to uniformity of type, 


Introductory 15 

if** ■£&< 

both physical and spiritual. The diversity is particu¬ 
larly marked among the civilised peoples, and perhaps 
in a peculiar degree among the peoples of Europe and 
her colonies. The extreme diversity of native character, 
both physical and spiritual, noticeable in these com¬ 
munities is in all probability due to their being made up 
of a mixture of racial stocks. In point of pedigree, all 
individuals in the peoples of the Western culture are 
hybrids, and the greater number of individuals are a 
mixture of more than two racial stocks. The proportions 
in which the several transmissible traits that go to make 
up the racial type enter into the composition of these 
hybrid individuals will accordingly vary endlessly. The 
number of possible permutations will therefore be ex¬ 
tremely large; so that the resulting range of variation 
in the hybrids that so result from the crossing of these 
different racial stocks will be sufficiently large, even when 
it plays within such limits as to leave the generic human 
type intact. From time to time the variation may even 
exceed these limits of human normality and give a 
variant in which the relative emphasis on the several 
constituent instinctive elements is distributed after a 
scheme so far from the generically human type as to 
throw the given variant out of touch with the common 
run of humanity and mark him as of unsound mind or as 
disserviceable for the purposes of the community in 
which he occurs, or even as disserviceable for life in any 
society. 

Yet, even through these hybrid populations there 
runs a generically human type of spiritual endowment, 
prevalent as a general average of human nature through¬ 
out, and suitable to the continued life of mankind in 


16 The Instinct of Workmanship 

society. Disserviceably wide departures from this 
generically human and serviceable type of spiritual en¬ 
dowment will tend constantly to be selectively eliminated 
from the race, even where the variation arises from 
hybridism. The like will hold true in a more radical 
fashion as applied to any variants that may arise through 
a Mendelian mutation. 

So that the numerous racial types now existing repre¬ 
sent only such mutants as lie within the limits of toler¬ 
ance imposed by the situation under which any given 
mutant type has emerged and survived. A surviving 
mutant type is necessarily suited more or less closely to 
the circumstances under which it emerged and first 
made good its survival, and it is presumably less suited 
to any other situation. With a change in the situation, 
therefore, such as may come with the migration of a 
given racial stock from one habitat to another, or with 
an equivalent shifting growth of culture or change of 
climate, the requirements of survival are likely to change. 
Indeed, so grave are the alterations that may in this way 
supervene in the current requirements for survival, that 
any given racial stock may dwindle and decay for no 
other reason than that the growth of its culture has come 
to subject the stock to methods of life widely different 
from those under which its type of man originated and 
made good its fitness to survive. So, in the mixture of 
races that make up the population of the Western nations 
a competitive struggle for survival has apparently always 
been going on among the several racial stocks that enter 
into the hybrid mass, with varying fortunes according 
as the shifting cultural demands and opportunities have 
favoured now one, now another type of man. These cul- 


Introductory 


17 


tural conditions of survival in the racial struggle for 
existence have varied in the course of centuries, and with 
grave consequences for the life-history of the race and 
of its culture; and they are perhaps changing more sub¬ 
stantially and rapidly in the immediate present than 
at any previous time within the historical period. So 
that, for instance, the continued biological success of 
any given one of these stocks in the European racial 
mixture has within a moderate period of time shifted 
from the ground of fighting capacity, and even in a 
measure from the ground of climatic fitness, to that 
of spiritual fitness to survive under the conditions im¬ 
posed by a new cultural situation, by a scheme of institu¬ 
tions that is insensibly but incessantly changing as it 
runs. 1 

These unremitting changes and adaptations that go 
forward in the scheme of institutions, legal and cus¬ 
tomary, unremittingly induce new habits of work and of 
thought in the community, and so they continually instil 
new principles of conduct; with the outcome that the 
same range of instinctive dispositions innate in the 
population will work out to a different effect as regards 
the demands of race survival. To all appearance, what 
counts first in this connection toward the selective sur¬ 
vival of the several European racial stocks is their rela¬ 
tive fitness to meet the material requirements of life,— 
their economic fitness to live under the new cultural 
limitations and with the new training which this altered 
cultural situation gives. But the fortunes of the Western 

1 Cf., e. g., Otto Ammon, Die Gesellschaftsordnung; G. Vacher de La- 
pouge, Les selections sociales, and Race et milieu social, especially “Lois 
fondamentales de TAnthroposociologie.” 


18 The Instinct of Workmanship 

civilisation as a cultural scheme, apart from the biological 
survival or success of any given racial constituent in the 
Western peoples, is likewise bound up with the viability 
of European mankind under these institutional changes, 
and dependent on the spiritual fitness of inherited human 
nature successfully and enduringly to carry on the altered 
scheme of life so imposed on these peoples by the growth 
of their own culture. Such limitations imposed on cul¬ 
tural growth by native proclivities ill suited to civilised 
life are sufficiently visible in several directions and in all 
the nations of Christendom. 

What is known of heredity goes to say that the various 
racial types of man are stable; so that during the life- 
history of any given racial stock, it is held, no heritable 
modification of its typical make-up, whether spiritual or 
physical, is to be looked for. The typical human endow¬ 
ment of instincts, as well as the typical make-up of the 
race in the physical respect, has according to this current 
view been transmitted intact from the beginning of 
humanity,—that is to say from whatever point in the 
mutational development of the race it is seen fit to date 
humanity,—except so far as subsequent mutations have 
given rise to new racial stocks, to and by which this 
human endowment of native proclivities has been trans¬ 
mitted in a typically modified form. On the other hand 
the habitual elements of human life change unremit¬ 
tingly and cumulatively, resulting in a continued pro¬ 
liferous growth of institutions. Changes in the institu¬ 
tional structure are continually taking place in response to 
the altered discipline of life under changing cultural con¬ 
ditions, but human nature remains specifically the same. 



Introductory ig 

4 v 

The ways and means, material and immaterial, by 
which the native proclivities work out their ends, there¬ 
fore, are forever in process of change, being conditioned 
by the changes cumulatively going forward in the insti¬ 
tutional fabric of habitual elements that governs the 
scheme of life. But there is no warrant for assuming 
that each or any of these successive changes in the scheme 
of institutions affords successively readier, surer or more 
facile ways and means for the instinctive proclivities to 
work out their ends, or that the phase of habituation in 
force at any given point in this sequence of change is 
more suitable to the untroubled functioning of these 
instincts than any phase that has gone before. Indeed, 
the presumption is the other way. On grounds of selec¬ 
tive survival it is reasonably to be presumed that any 
given racial type that has endured the test of selective 
elimination, including the complement of instinctive 
dispositions by virtue of which it has endured the test, 
will on its first emergence have been passably suited to 
the circumstances, material and cultural, under which the 
type emerged as a mutant and made good its survival; 
and in so far as the subsequent growth of institutions 
has altered the available scope and method of instinctive 
action it is therefore to be presumed that any such sub¬ 
sequent change in the scheme of institutions will in some 
degree hinder or divert the free play of its instinctive 
proclivities and will thereby hinder the direct and un¬ 
sophisticated working-out of the instinctive dispositions 
native to this given racial type. 

What is known of the earlier phases of culture in the 
life-history of the existing races and peoples goes to say 
that the initial phase in the life of any given racial type, 


20 The Instinct of Workmanship 

the phase of culture which prevailed in its environment 
when it emerged, and under which the stock first proved 
its fitness to survive, was presumably some form of 
savagery. Therefore the fitness of any given type of 
human nature for life after the manner and under the 
conditions imposed by any later phase in the growth of 
culture is a matter of less and less secure presumption 
the farther the sequence of institutional change has 
departed from that form of savagery which marked the 
initial stage in the life-history of the given racial stock. 
Also, presumably, though by no means assuredly, the 
younger stocks, those which have emerged from later 
mutations of type, have therefore initially fallen into 
and made good their survival under the conditions of a 
relatively advanced phase of savagery,—these younger 
races should therefore conform with greater facility and 
better effect to the requirements imposed by a still 
farther advance in that cumulative complication of 
institutions and intricacy of ways and means that is 
involved in cultural growth. The older or more primi¬ 
tive stocks, those which arose out of earlier mutations 
of type and made good their survival under a more 
elementary scheme of savage culture, are presumably less 
capable of adaptation to an advanced cultural scheme. 

But at the same time it is on the same grounds to be 
expected that in all races and peoples there should always 
persist an ineradicable sentimental disposition to take 
back to something like that scheme of savagery for 
which their particular type of human nature once proved 
its fitness during the initial phase of its life-history. This 
seems to be what is commonly intended in the cry, 
“Back to Nature!” The older known racial stocks, 


Introductory 


21 


the offspring of earlier mutational departures from the 
initially generic human type, will have been selectively 
adapted to more archaic forms of savagery, and these 
show an appreciably more refractory penchant for ele¬ 
mentary savage modes of life, and conform to the de¬ 
mands and opportunities of a “higher” civilisation only 
with a relatively slight facility, amounting in extreme 
cases to a practical unfitness for civilised life. Hence 
the “White Man’s Burden” and the many perplexities 
of the missionaries. 

Under the Mendelian theories of heredity some quali¬ 
fication of these broad generalisations is called for. As 
has already been noted above, the peoples of Europe, 
each and several, are hybrid mixtures made up of several 
racial stocks. The like is true in some degree of most of 
the peoples outside of Europe; particularly of the more 
important and better known nationalities. These various 
peoples show more or less distinct and recognisable na¬ 
tional types of physique—or perhaps rather of physiog¬ 
nomy—and temperament, and the lines of differentiation 
between these national types incontinently traverse the 
lines that divide the racial stocks. At the same time 
these national types have some degree of permanence; so 
much so that they are colloquially spoken of as types of 
race. While no modern anthropologist would confuse 
nationality with race, it is not to be overlooked that 
these national hybrid types are frequently so marked 
and characteristic as to simulate racial characters and 
perplex the student of race who is intent on identifying 
the racial stocks out of which any one of these hybrid 
populations has been compounded. Presumably these 



22 - The Instinct of Workmanship 

Y'ii 

national and local types of physiognomy and tempera¬ 
ment are to be rated as hybrid types that have been 
fixed by selective breeding, and for an explanation of 
this phenomenon recourse is to be taken to the latterday 
theories of heredity. 

To any student familiar with the simpler phenomena 
of hybridism it will be evident that under the Mendelian 
rules of hybridisation the number of biologically suc¬ 
cessful—viable—hybrid forms arising from any cross 
between two or more forms may diverge very widely 
from one another and from either of the parent types. 
The variation must be extreme both in the number of 
hybrid types so constructed and in the range over which 
the variation extends,—much greater in both respects 
than the range of fluctuating (non-typical) variations 
obtainable under any circumstances in a pure-bred race, 
particularly in the remoter filial generations. It is also 
well known, by experiment, that by selective breeding 
from among such hybrid forms it is possible to construct 
a composite type that will breed true in respect of the 
characters upon which the selection is directed, and that 
such a “pure line” may be maintained indefinitely, in 
spite of its hybrid origin, so long as it is not crossed back 
on one or other of the parent stocks, or on a hybrid stock 
that is not pure-bred in respect of the selected characters. 

So, if the conditions of fife in any community consist¬ 
ently favour a given type of hybrid, whether the favour¬ 
ing conditions are of a cultural or of a material nature, 
something of a selective trend will take effect in such a 
community and set toward a hybrid type which shall 
meet these conditions. The result will be the establish¬ 
ment of a composite pure line showing the advantageous 


Introductory 23 

traits of physique and temperament, combined with a 
varying complement of other characters that have no 
such selective value. Traits that have no selective value 
in the given case will occur with fortuitous freedom, 
combining in unconstrained diversity with the selec¬ 
tively decisive traits, and so will mark the hybrid deriva¬ 
tion of this provisionally established composite pure line. 
With continued intercrossing within itself any given 
population of such hybrid origin as the European peoples, 
would tend cumulatively to breed true to such a selec¬ 
tively favourable hybrid type, rather than to any one of 
the ultimate racial types represented by the parent 
stocks out of which the hybrid population is ultimately 
made up. So would emerge a national or local type, 
which would show the selectively decisive traits with 
a great degree of consistency but would vary indefinitely 
in respect of the selectively idle traits comprised in the 
composite heredity of the population. Such a composite 
pure line would be provisionally stable only; it should 
break down when crossed back on either of the parent 
stocks. This “provisionally stable composite pure line” 
should disappear when crossed on pure-bred individuals 
of one or other of the parent stocks from which it is 
drawn,—pure-bred in respect of the allelomorphic char¬ 
acters which give the hybrid type its typical traits. 

But whatever the degree of stability possessed by 
these hybrid national or local types, the outcome for 
the present purpose is much the same; the hybrid popula¬ 
tions afford a greater scope and range of variation in 
their human nature than could be had within the limits of 
any pure-bred race. Yet, for all the multifarious di¬ 
versity of racial and national types, early and late, and 


24 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


for all the wide divergence of hybrid variants, there is 
no difficulty about recognising a generical human type of 
spiritual endowment, just as the zoologists have no 
difficulty in referring the various races of mankind to a 
single species on the ground of their physical characters. 
The distribution of emphasis among the several instinc¬ 
tive dispositions may vary appreciably from one race to 
another, but the complement of instincts native to the 
several races is after all of much the same kind, compris¬ 
ing substantially the same ends. Taken simply in their 
first incidence, the racial variations of human nature are 
commonly not considerable; but a slight bias of this 
kind, distinctive of any given race, may come to have 
decisive weight when it works out cumulatively through 
a system of institutions, for such a system embodies the 
cumulative sophistications of untold generations during 
which the life of the community has been dominated by 
the same slight bias. 1 

Racial differences in respect of these hereditary spirit¬ 
ual traits count for much in the outcome, because in the 
last resort any race is at the mercy of its instincts. In 
the course of cultural growth most of those civilisations 
or peoples that have had a long history have from time 
to time been brought up against an imperative call to 
revise their scheme of institutions in the light of their 
native instincts, on pain of collapse or decay; and they 
have chosen variously, and for the most part blindly, 
to live or not to live, according as their instinctive bias 


1 The all-pervading modem institution of private property appears to 
have been of such an origin, having cumulatively grown out of the self- 
regarding bias of men in their oversight of the community’s material in¬ 
terests. 


Introductory 25 

has driven them. In the cases where it has happened 
that those instincts which make directly for the ma¬ 
terial welfare of the community, such as the parental 
bent and the sense of workmanship, have been present 
in such potent -force, or where the institutional elements 
at variance with the continued life-interests of the com¬ 
munity or the civilisation in question have been in a 
sufficiently infirm state, there the bonds of custom, pre¬ 
scription, principles, precedent, have been broken—or 
loosened or shifted so as to let the current of life and 
cultural growth go on, with or without substantial re¬ 
tardation. But history records more frequent and more 
spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institu¬ 
tions over life and culture than of peoples who have by 
force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out 
of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, 
for instance, as now faces the peoples of Christendom. 

.1^ . 

\ 

Chief among those instinctive dispositions that con¬ 
duce directly to the material well-being of the race, and 
therefore to its biological success, is perhaps the instinc¬ 
tive bias here spoken of as the sense of workmanship. 
The only other instinctive factor of human nature that 
could with any likelihood dispute this primacy would 
be the parental bent. Indeed, the two have much in 
common. They spend themselves on much the same 
concrete objective ends, and the mutual furtherance of 
each by the other is indeed so broad and intimate as 
often to leave it a matter of extreme difficulty to draw 
a line between them. Any discussion of either, there¬ 
fore, must unavoidably draw the other into the in¬ 
quiry to a greater or less extent, and a characterisa- 


26 The Instinct of Workmanship 

tion of the one will involve some dealing with the 
other. 

As the expression is here understood, the “ Parental 
Bent” is an instinctive disposition of much larger scope 
than a mere proclivity to the achievement of children. 1 
This latter is doubtless to be taken as a large and per¬ 
haps as a primary element in the practical working of 
the parental solicitude; although, even so, it is in no 
degree to be confused with the quasi-tropismatic impulse 
to the procreation of offspring. The parental solicitude 
in mankind has a much wider bearing than simply the 
welfare of one’s own children. This wider bearing is 
particularly evident in those lower cultures w T here the 
scheme of consanguinity and inheritance is not drawn 
on the same close family lines as among civilised peoples, 
but it is also to be seen in good vigour in any civilised 
community. So, for instance, what the phrase-makers 
have called “race-suicide” meets the instinctive and un¬ 
solicited reprobation of all men, even of those who would 
not conceivably go the length of contributing in their 
own person to the incoming generation. So also, vir¬ 
tually all thoughtful persons,—that is to say all persons 
who hold an opinion in these premises,—will agree that 
it is a despicably inhuman thing for the current genera¬ 
tion wilfully to make the way of life harder for the next 
generation, whether through neglect of due provision 
for their subsistence and proper training or through 
wasting their heritage of resources and opportunity by 
improvident greed and indolence. Providence is a virtue 
only so far as its aim is provision for posterity. 

It is difficult or impossible to say how far the current 
1 Cf. McDougall, Social Psychology , ch. x. 


Introductory 


27 


solicitude for the welfare of the race at large is to be 
credited to the parental bent, but it is beyond question 
that this instinctive disposition has a large part in the 
sentimental concern entertained by nearly all persons 
for the life and comfort of the community at large, and 
particularly for the community’s future welfare. Doubt¬ 
less this parental bent in its wider bearing greatly reen¬ 
forces that sentimental approval of economy and effi¬ 
ciency for the common good and disapproval of wasteful 
and useless living that prevails so generally throughout 
both the highest and the lowest cultures, unless it should 
rather be said that this animus for economy and efficiency 
is a simple expression of the parental disposition itself. 
It might on the other hand be maintained that such an 
animus of economy is an essential function of the instinct 
of workmanship, which would then be held to be strongly 
sustained at this point by a parental solicitude for the 
common good. 

In making use of the expression, “ instinct of workman¬ 
ship” or “sense of workmanship,” it is not here intended 
to assume or to argue that the proclivity so designated 
is in the psychological respect a simple or irreducible 
element; still less, of course, is there any intention to 
allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological 
respect to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or 
some single enzymotic or visceral stimulus. All that is 
matter for the attention of those whom it may concern. 
The expression may as well be taken to signify a con¬ 
currence of several instinctive aptitudes, each of which 
might or might not prove simple or irreducible when 
subjected to psychological or physiological analysis. For 
the present inquiry it is enough to note that in human 


28 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


behaviour this disposition is effective in such consistent, 
ubiquitous and resilient fashion that students of human 
culture will have to count with it as one of the integral 
hereditary traits of mankind. 1 

As has already appeared, neither this nor any other 
instinctive disposition works out its functional content 
in isolation from the instinctive endowment at large. 

1 Latterly the question of instincts has been a subject of somewhat ex¬ 
tensive discussion among students of animal behaviour, and throughout 
this discussion the argument has commonly been conducted on neuro¬ 
logical, or at the most on physiological ground. This line of argument is 
well and lucidly presented in a volume recently published ( The Science of 
Human Behavior, New York, 1913) by Mr. Maurice Parmalee. The book 
offers an incisive critical discussion of the Nature of Instinct (ch. xi) with 
a specific reference to the instinct of workmanship (p. 252). The discus¬ 
sion runs, faithfully and competently, on neurological ground and reaches 
the outcome to be expected in an endeavour to reduce instinct to neuro¬ 
logical (or physiological) terms. As has commonly been true of similar 
endeavours, the outcome is essentially negative, in that “ instinct ” is not so 
much explained as explained away. The reason of this outcome is suffi¬ 
ciently evident; “instinct,” being not a neurological or physiological con¬ 
cept, is not statable in neurological or physiological terms. The instinct 
of workmanship no more than any other instinctive proclivity is an 
isolable, discrete neural function; which, however, does not touch the 
question of its status as a psychological element. The effect of such an 
analysis as is offered by Mr. Parmalee is not to give terminological preci¬ 
sion to the concept of “instinct” in the sense assigned it in current usage, 
but to dispense with it; which is an untoward move in that it deprives the 
student of the free use of this familiar term in its familiar sense and there¬ 
fore constrains him to bring the indispensable concept of instinct in again 
surreptitiously under cover of some unfamiliar term or some terminologi¬ 
cal circumlocution. The current mechanistic analyses of animal be¬ 
haviour are of great and undoubted value to any inquiry into human 
conduct, but their value does not lie in an attempt to make them super¬ 
sede those psychological phenomena which it is their purpose to explain. 
That such supersession of psychological phenomena by the mechanistic 
formulations need nowise follow and need not be entertained appears, 
e. g., in such work as that of Mr. Loeb, referred to above, Comparative 
Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology. 


Introductory 


29 


The instincts, all and several, though perhaps in varying 
degrees, are so intimately engaged in a play of give and 
take that the work of any one has its consequences for 
all the rest, though presumably not for all equally. It is 
this endless 1 complication and contamination of instinc¬ 
tive elements in human conduct, taken in conjunction 
with the pervading and cumulative effects of habit in 
this domain, that makes most of the difficulty and 
much of the interest attaching to this line of in¬ 
quiry. 

There are few lines of instinctive proclivity that are 
not crossed and coloured by some ramification of the 
instinct of workmanship. No doubt, response to the 
direct call of such half-tropismatic, half-instinctive im¬ 
pulses as hunger, anger, or the promptings of sex, is little 
if at all troubled with any sentimental suffusion of work¬ 
manship; but in the more complex and deliberate activi¬ 
ties, particularly where habit exerts an appreciable effect, 
the impulse and sentiment of workmanship comes in 
for a large share in the outcome. So much so, indeed, 
that, for instance, in the arts, where the sense of beauty 
is the prime mover, habitual attention to technique will 
often put the original, and only ostensible, motive in the 
background. So, again, in the life of religious faith and 
observance it may happen now and again that theological 
niceties and ritual elaboration will successfully, and in 
great measure satisfactorily, substitute themselves for 
spiritual communion; while in the courts of law a tena¬ 
cious following out of legal technicalities will not infre¬ 
quently defeat the ends of justice. 

1 Endless in the sense that the effects of such concatenation do not run 
to a final term in any direction. 


30 


The Instinct oj Workmanship 


As the expression is here understood, all instinctive 
action is intelligent in some degree; though the degree in 
which intelligence is engaged may vary widely from one 
instinctive disposition to another, and it may even fall 
into an extremely automatic shape in the case of some 
of the simpler instincts, whose functional content is of a 
patently physiological character. Such approach to 
automatism is even more evident in some of the lower 
animals, where, as for instance in the case of some in¬ 
sects, the response to the appropriate stimuli is so far 
uniform and mechanically determinate as to leave it 
doubtful whether the behaviour of the animal might not 
best be construed as tropismatic action simply. 1 Such 
tropismatic directness of instinctive response is less 
characteristic of man even in the case of the simpler in¬ 
stinctive proclivities; and the indirection which so char¬ 
acterises instinctive action in general, and the higher in¬ 
stincts of man in particular, and which marks off the 

1 Many students of animal behaviour are still, as psychologists gener¬ 
ally once were, inclined to contrast instinct with intelligence,and to con¬ 
fine the term typically to such automatically determinate action as takes 
effect without deliberation or intelligent oversight. This view would 
appear to be a remnant of an earlier theoretical position, according to 
which all the functions of intelligence were referred to a distinct imma¬ 
terial entity, entelechy, associated in symbiosis with the physical organ¬ 
ism. If all such preconceptions of a substantial dichotomy between 
physiological and psychological activity be abandoned it becomes a mat¬ 
ter of course that intellectual functions themselves take effect only on the 
initiative of the instinctive dispositions and under their surveillance, and 
the antithesis between instinct and intelligence will consequently fall 
away. What expedients of terminology and discrimination may then 
be resorted to in the study of those animal instincts that involve a mini¬ 
mum of intellect is of course a question for the comparative psychologists. 
Cf., for instance, C. Lloyd Morgan, Introduction to Comparative Psychol¬ 
ogy (2nd edition, 1906) ch. xii, especially pp. 206-209, and Habit and In~ 
stincty ch. i and vi 


Introductory 31 

instinctive dispositions from the tropisms, is the indirec¬ 
tion of intelligence. It enters more largely in the dis¬ 
charge of some proclivities than of others; but all instinc¬ 
tive action is intelligent in some degree. This is what 
marks it off from the tropisms and takes it out of the 
category of automatism. 1 

Hence all instinctive action is teleological. It involves 
holding to a purpose. It aims to achieve some end and 
involves some degree of intelligent faculty to compass 
the instinctively given purpose, under surveillance of 
the instinctive proclivity that prompts the action. And 
it is in this surveillance and direction of the intellectual 
processes to the appointed end that the instinctive dis¬ 
positions control and condition human conduct; and in 
this work of direction the several instinctive proclivities 
may come to conflict and offset, or to concur and reen¬ 
force one another’s action. 

The position of the instinct of workmanship in this 
complex of teleological activities is somewhat peculiar, 
in that its functional content is serviceability for the 
ends of life, whatever these ends may be; whereas these 
ends to be subserved are, at least in the main, appointed 
and made worth while by the various other instinctive 
dispositions. So that this instinct may in some sense be 
said to be auxiliary to all the rest, to be concerned with 
the ways and means of life rather than with any one given 
ulterior end. It has essentially to do with proximate 
rather than ulterior ends. Yet workmanship is none the 
less an object of attention and sentiment in its own right. 
Efficient use of the means at hand and adequate manage¬ 
ment of the resources available for the purposes of life 
1 Cf. H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Animals , ch. xii, xx, xxi. 


32 The Instinct of Workmanship 

is itself an end of endeavour, and accomplishment of this 
kind is a source of gratification. 

All instinctive action is intelligent and teleological. 
The generality of instinctive dispositions prompt simply 
to the direct and unambiguous attainment of their specific 
ends, and in his dealings under their immediate guidance 
the agent goes as directly as may be to the end sought,— 
he is occupied with the objective end, not with the choice 
of means to the end sought; whereas under the impulse 
of workmanship the agent’s interest and endeavour are 
taken up with the contriving of ways and means to the 
end sought. 

The point of contrast may be unfamiliar, and an illus¬ 
tration may be pertinent. So, in the instinct of pugnacity 
and its attendant sentiment of anger 1 the primary im¬ 
pulse is doubtless to a direct frontal attack, assault and 
battery pure and simple; and the more highly charged 
the agent is with the combative impulse, and the higher 
the pitch of animation to which he has been wrought up, 
the less is he inclined or able to take thought of how he 
may shrewdly bring mechanical devices to bear on the 
object of his sentiment and compass his end with the 
largest result per unit of force expended. It is only the 
well-trained fighter that will take without reflection to 
workmanlike ways and means at such a juncture; and 
in case of extreme exasperation and urgency even such 
a one, it is said, may forget his workmanship in the 
premises and throw himself into the middle of things 
instead of resorting to the indirections and leverages to 
which his workmanlike training in the art of fighting 
has habituated him. So, again, the immediate prompt- 
1 See McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, ch. iii and x. 


Introductory 


33 


ings of the parental bent urge to direct personal interven¬ 
tion and service in behalf of the object of solicitude. In 
persons highly gifted in this respect the impulse asserts 
itself to succour the helpless with one’s own hands, to 
do for them in one’s own person not what might on reflec¬ 
tion approve itself as the most expedient line of conduct 
in the premises, but what will throw the agent most per¬ 
sonally into action in the case. Notoriously, it is easier 
to move well-meaning people to unreflecting charity on 
an immediate and concrete appeal than it is to secure a 
sagacious, well sustained and well organised concert of 
endeavour for the amelioration of the lot of the unfor¬ 
tunate. Indeed, refinements of workmanlike calculation 
of causes and effects in such a case are instinctively felt 
to be out of touch with the spirit of the thing. They 
are distasteful; not only are they not part and parcel of 
the functional content of the generous impulse, but an 
undue injection of these elements of workmanship into 
the case may even induce a revulsion of feeling and de¬ 
feat its own intention. 

The instinct of workmanship, on the other hand, oc¬ 
cupies the interest with practical expedients, ways and 
means, devices and contrivances of efficiency and econ¬ 
omy, proficiency, creative work and technological mas¬ 
tery of facts. Much of the functional content of the 
instinct of workmanship is a proclivity for taking pains. 
The best or most finished outcome of this disposition is 
not had under stress of great excitement or under ex¬ 
treme urgency from any of the instinctive propensities 
with which its work is associated or whose ends it serves. 
It shows at its best, both in the individual workman’s 
technological efficiency and in the growth of technological 


34 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


proficiency and insight in the community at large, under 
circumstances of moderate exigence, where there is work 
in hand and more of it in sight, since it is initially a dis¬ 
position to do the next thing and do it as well as may be; 
whereas when interest falls off unduly through failure 
of provocation from the instinctive dispositions that 
afford an end to which to work, the stimulus to workman¬ 
ship is likely to fail, and the outcome is as likely to be an 
endless fabrication of meaningless details and much ado 
about nothing. On the other hand, in seasons of great 
stress, when the call to any one or more of the instinctive 
lines of conduct is urgent beyond measure, there is likely 
to result a crudity of technique and presently a loss of 
proficiency and technological mastery. 

It is, further, pertinent to note in this connection that 
the instinct of workmanship will commonly not run to 
passionate excesses; that it does not, under pressure, 
tenaciously hold its place as a main interest in competi¬ 
tion with the other, more elemental instinctive proclivi¬ 
ties; but that it rather yields ground somewhat readily, 
suffers repression and falls into abeyance, only to reassert 
itself when the pressure of other, urgent interests is 
relieved. What was said above as to the paramount 
significance of the instinct of workmanship for the life 
of the race will of course suffer no abatement in so recog¬ 
nising its characteristically temperate urgency. The 
grave importance that attaches to it is a matter of its 
ubiquitous subservience to the ends of life, and not a 
matter of vehemence. 

The sense of workmanship is also peculiarly subject 
to bias. It does not commonly, or normally, work to an 
independent, creative end of its own, but is rather con- 


Introductory 


35 


cerned with the ways and means whereby instinctively 
given purposes are to be accomplished. According, there¬ 
fore, as one or another of the instinctive dispositions is 
predominant in the community’s scheme of life or in the 
individual’s every-day interest, the habitual trend of the 
sense of workmanship will be bent to one or another line 
of proficiency and technological mastery. By cumula¬ 
tive habituation a bias of this character may come to 
have very substantial consequences for the range and 
scope of technological knowledge, the state of the indus¬ 
trial arts, and for the rate and direction of growth in 
workmanlike ideals. 

Changes are going forward constantly and incontin¬ 
ently in the institutional apparatus, the habitual scheme 
of rules and principles that regulate the community’s 
life, and not least in the technological ways and means 
by which the life of the race and its state of culture are 
maintained; but changes come rarely—in effect not at 
all—in the endowment of instincts whereby mankind is 
enabled to employ these means and to live under the 
institutions which its habits of life have cumulatively 
created. In the case of hybrid populations, such as the V 
peoples of Christendom, some appreciable adaptation 
of this spiritual endowment to meet the changing re¬ 
quirements of civilisation may be counted on, through 
the establishment of composite pure lines of a hybrid 
type more nearly answering to the later phases of culture 
than any one of the original racial types out of which the 
hybrid population is made up. But in so slow-breeding 
a species as man, and with changes in the conditions of 
life going forward at a visibly rapid pace, the chance of 


36 The Instinct of Workmanship 

an adequate adaptation of hybrid human nature to new 
conditions seems doubtful at the best. It is also to be 
noted that the vague character of many of the human 
instincts, and their consequent pliability under habitua¬ 
tion, affords an appreciable margin of adaptation within 
which human nature may adjust itself to new conditions 
of life. But after all has been said it remains true that 
the margin within which the instinctive nature of the 
race can be effectively adapted to changing circumstances 
is relatively narrow—narrow as contrasted with the range 
of variation in institutions—and the limits of such 
adaptation are somewhat rigid. As the matter stands, 
the race is required to meet changing conditions of life 
to which its relatively unchanging endowment of instincts 
is presumably not wholly adapted, and to meet these 
conditions by the use of technological ways and means 
widely different from those that were at the disposal of 
the race from the outset. In the initial phases of the 
life-history of the race, or of any given racial stock, the 
exigencies to which its spiritual (instinctive) nature was 
selectively required to conform were those of the savage 
culture, as has been indicated above,—presumably in 
all cases a somewhat “low” or elementary form of 
savagery. This savage mode of life, which was, and is, 
in a sense, native to man, would be characterised by a 
considerable group solidarity within a relatively small 
group, living very near the soil, and unremittingly de¬ 
pendent for their daily life on the workmanlike efficiency 
of all the members of the group. The prime requisite for 
survival under these conditions would be a propensity 
unselfishly and impersonally to make the most of the 
material means at hand and a penchant for turning all 


Introductory 37 

resources of knowledge and material to account to sus¬ 
tain the life of the group. 

At the outset, therefore, as it first comes into the life- 
history of any one or all of the racial stocks with which 
modern inquiry concerns itself, this instinctive disposi¬ 
tion will have borne directly on workmanlike efficiency 
in the simple and obvious sense of the word. By virtue 
of the stability of the racial type, such is still its character, 
primarily and substantially, apart from its sophistication 
by habit and tradition. The instinct of workmanship 
brought the life of mankind from the brute to the human 
plane, and in all the later growth of culture it has never 
ceased to pervade the works of man. But the extensive 
complication of circumstances and the altered outlook 
of succeeding generations, brought on by the growth of 
institutions and the accumulation of knowledge, have 
led to an extension of its scope and of its canons and 
logic to activities and conjunctures that have little 
traceable bearing on the means of subsistence. 


CHAPTER II 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology! 

All instinctive behaviour is subject to development 
and hence to modification by habit. 1 Such impulsive 
action as is in no degree intelligent, and so suffers no 
adaptation through habitual use, is not properly to be 
called instinctive; it is rather to be classed as tropismatic. 
In human conduct the effects of habit in this respect are 
particularly far-reaching. In man the instincts appoint 
less of a determinate sequence of action, and so leave a 
more open field for adaptation of behaviour to the cir¬ 
cumstances of the case. When instinct enjoins little 
else than the end of endeavour, leaving the sequence of 
acts by which this end is to be approached somewhat a 
matter of open alternatives, the share of reflection, dis¬ 
cretion and deliberate adaptation will be correspondingly 
large. The range and diversity of habituation is also 
correspondingly enlarged. 

In man, too, by the same fact, habit takes on more of 
a cumulative character, in that the habitual acquire¬ 
ments of the race are handed on from one generation to 
the next, by tradition, training, education, or whatever 
general term may best designate that discipline of habitu- 

1 Cf. M. F. Washburn, The Animal Mind , ch. x, xi, where the simpler 
facts of habituation are suggestively presented in conformity with current 
views of empirical psychology. 


38 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 39 

ation by which the young acquire what the old have 
learned. By similar means the like elements of habitual 
conduct are carried over from one community or one 
culture to another, leading to further complications. 
Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs, 
conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of 
conduct that run back only indirectly to the native pre¬ 
dispositions of the race, but that may affect the working- 
out of any given line of endeavour in much the same way 
as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a 
native bias. 

Along with this body of derivative standards and 
canons of conduct, and handed on by the same discipline 
of habituation, goes a cumulative body of knowledge, 
made up in part of matter-of-fact acquaintance with 
phenomena and in greater part of conventional wisdom 
embodying certain acquired predilections and precon¬ 
ceptions current in the community. Workmanship pro¬ 
ceeds on the accumulated knowledge so received and 
current, and turns it to account in dealing with the ma¬ 
terial means of life. Whatever passes current in this 
way as knowledge of facts is turned to account as far 
as may be, and so it is worked into a customary scheme 
of ways and means, a system of technology, into which 
new elements of information or acquaintance with the 
nature and use of things are incorporated, assimilated 
as they come. 

The scheme of technology so worked out and carried 
along in the routine of getting a living will be serviceable 
for current use and have a substantial value for a further 
advance in technological efficiency somewhat in propor¬ 
tion as the knowledge so embodied in technological prac- 


40 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tice is effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact. Much 
of the information derived from experience in industry 
is likely to be of this matter-of-fact nature; but much of 
the knowledge made use of for the technological purpose 
is also of the nature of convention, inference, and au¬ 
thentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than 
workmanlike experience. This alien body of informa¬ 
tion, or pseudo-information, goes into the grand total 
of human knowledge quite as freely as any matter of 
fact, and it is therefore also necessarily taken up and 
assimilated in that technological equipment of knowledge 
and proficiency by use of which the work in hand is to 
be done. 

But the experience which yields this useful and quasi¬ 
useful knowledge is got under the impulsion and guid¬ 
ance of one and another of the instincts with which man 
is endowed, and takes the shape and color given it by 
the instinctive bias in whose service it is acquired. At 
the same time, whatever its derivation, the knowledge 
acquired goes into the aggregate of information drawn 
on for the ways and means of workmanship. Therefore 
the habits formed in any line of experience, under the 
guidance of any given instinctive disposition, will have 
their effect on the conduct and aims of the workman in 
all his work and play; so that progress in technological 
matters is by no means an outcome of the sense of work¬ 
manship alone. 

It follows that in all their working the human instincts 
are in this way incessantly subject to mutual “ contamina¬ 
tion,” whereby the working of any one is incidentally 
affected by the bias and proclivities inherent in all the 
rest; and in so far as these current habits and customs in 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 41 

this way come to reenforce the predispositions comprised 
under any one instinct or any given group of instincts, 
the bias so accentuated comes to pervade the habits of 
thought of all the members of the community and gives 
a corresponding obliquity to the technological ground¬ 
work of the community. So, for instance, addiction to 
magical, superstitious or religious conceptions will neces¬ 
sarily have its effect on the conceptions and logic em¬ 
ployed in technological theory and practice, and will 
impair its efficiency by that much. A people much given 
to punctilios of rank and respect of persons will in some 
degree carry these habitual predilections over into the 
field of workmanship and will allow considerations of 
authenticity, of personal weight and consequence, to 
decide questions of technological expediency; so that 
ideas which have none but a putative efficiency may in 
this way come in for a large share in the state of the in¬ 
dustrial arts. A people whose culture has for any reason 
taken on a pronounced coercive (predatory) character, 
with rigorous class distinctions, an arbitrary govern¬ 
mental control, formidable gods and an authoritative 
priesthood, will have its industrial organisation and its 
industrial arts fashioned to meet the demands and the 
logic of these institutions. Such an institutional situa¬ 
tion exerts a great and pervasive constraint on the 
technological scheme in which workmanship takes effect 
under its rule, both directly by prescribing the things 
to do and the time, place and circumstance of doing 
them, and indirectly through the habits of thought in¬ 
duced in the working population living under its rule. 
Innovation, the utilisation of newly acquired techno¬ 
logical insight, is greatly hindered by such institutional 



42 The Instinct of Workmanship 

requirements that are enforced by other impulses than 
the sense of workmanship. 

In the known lower cultures such institutional com¬ 
plications as might be expected greatly to hinder or de¬ 
flect the sense of workmanship are commonly neither 
large, rigorous nor obvious. Something of the kind there 
apparently always is, in the way, for instance, of the cus¬ 
tomary prerogatives and perquisites of the older men, as 
well as their tutelary oversight of the younger genera¬ 
tion and of the common interests of the group. 1 When 
this rule of seniority is elaborated into such set forms as 
the men’s (secret) societies, with exacting initiatory 
ceremonies and class tabus, 2 its effect on workday life 
is often very considerable, even though the community 
may show little that can fairly be classed as autocracy, 
chieftainship, or even aristocratic government. In many 
or all of these naive and early developments of authority, 
and perhaps especially in those cultures where the control 
takes this inchoate form of a customary “gerontocracy,” 3 
its immediate effect is that an abiding sense of authen¬ 
ticity comes to pervade the routine of daily life, such as 
effectually to obstruct all innovation, whether in the ways 
and means of work or in the conduct of life more at 
large. Control by a gerontocracy appears to reach its 
best development and to run with the fullest consistency 
and effect in communities where an appreciable degree 
of predatory exploit is habitual, and the inference is 
ready, and at least plausible, that this institution is sub- 

1 Cf., e. g., Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia ; 
Seligmann, The Veddas. 

2 Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies , especially ch. iii and iv. 

3 J. G. Frazer, Early History of the Kingship , ch. iv, p. 107. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 43 

stantially of a predatory origin, that the principles 
(habits of thought) on which it rests are an outgrowth 
of pugnacity, self-aggrandisement and fear. Under 
favouring conditions of friction and jealousy between 
groups these propensities will settle into institutional 
habits of authority and deference, and so long as the 
resultant exercise of control is vested by custom in the 
class of elders the direct consequence is a marked abate¬ 
ment of initiative throughout the community and a con¬ 
sequent appearance of conservatism and stagnation in 
its technological scheme as well as in the customary 
usages under whose guidance the community lives. 1 So 
these instinctive propensities which have no primary 
significance in the way of workmanship may come to 
count very materially in shaping the group’s techno¬ 
logical equipment of ideas and in deflecting the sense 
of workmanship from the naive pursuit of material 
efficiency. 

The rule of the elders appears to have been extremely 
prevalent in the earlier phases of culture. So much so 
that it may even be set down as the most characteristic 
trait of the upper savagery and of the lower barbarism; 
whether it takes the elaborately institutionalised form 
of a settled gerontocracy, as among the Australian blacks, 
with sharply defined class divisions and perquisites and 
a consistent subjection of women and children; or the 
looser customary rule of the Elders, with a degree of 
deference and circumspection on the part of the younger 
generation and an uncertain conventional inferiority of 
women and children, as seen among the pagans of the 

1 E. g., some native tribes of Australia; cf. Spencer and Gillen, The 
Native Tribes of Central Australia, especially ch, i. 



44 The Instinct of Workmanship 

• * ■, 

Malay peninsula, 1 the Eskimo of the Arctic seaboard, 2 

the Mincopies of the Andamans, 3 or, on a somewhat 
higher level, the Pueblo Indians of the American South¬ 
west. 4 Illustrative instances of such an inchoate organis¬ 
ation of authority are very widely distributed, but the 
communities that follow such a naive scheme of life are 
commonly neither large, powerful, wealthy, nor much 
in the public eye. The presumption is that the sense of 
authenticity which pervades these and similar cultures, 
amounting to a degree of tabu on innovation, has had 
much to do with the notably slow advance of technology 
among savage peoples. Such appears presumably to 
have been the prevalent run of the facts throughout the 
stone age in all quarters of the Earth. 

It is not altogether plain just what are the innate pre¬ 
dispositions chiefly involved in this primitive social 
control which at its untroubled best develops into a 
“ gerontocracy.” There can apparently be little ques¬ 
tion but that its prime motive force is the parental bent, 
expressing itself in a naive impulsive surveillance of the 
common interests of the group and a tutelage of the 
incoming generation. But here as in other social re¬ 
lations the self-regarding sentiments unavoidably come 
into play; so that (a) the tutelage of the elders takes 


1 Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula. 

2 J. Murdoch, “The Point Barrow Eskimo,” Report of the Bureau of 
American Ethnology , 1887-1888; F. Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” Ibid, 
1884-1885. 

3 E. H. Man, “On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman 
Islands,” J. A. /., vol. xii. 

4 Reports , Bureau of American Ethnology , numerous papers by different 
writers, perhaps especially Mrs. Stevenson, “The Sia,” nth Report 
(1880-1890). 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 45 

something of an authoritative tone and blends self¬ 
aggrandisement with their quasi-parental solicitude, giv¬ 
ing an institutional outcome which makes the young 
generation subservient to the elders, ostensibly for the 
mutual and collective good of both parties to the rela¬ 
tion; ( h) if predatory or warlike exploit in any degree 
becomes habitual to the community the sentiment of 
self-aggrandisement gets the upper hand, and subserv¬ 
ience to the able-bodied elders becomes the dominant 
note in this relation of tutelage, and their parental in¬ 
terest in the welfare of the incoming generation in a cor¬ 
responding degree goes into abeyance under the pressure 
of the appropriate sentiments of pugnacity and self- 
seeking, giving rise to a coercive regime of a more or less 
ruthless character; (c) correlatively, along with unweary¬ 
ing insistence on their own prerogatives and collective 
discretion, on the part of the elders, there goes, on the 
part of the community at large, a correspondingly ha¬ 
bitual acceptance of their findings and the precedents 
they have established, resulting in a universal addiction 
to the broad principles of unmitigated authenticity, 
with no power anywhere capable of breaking across the 
accumulated precedents and tabus. Even the ruling 
class of elders, being an unwieldy deliberative body or 
executive committee, is held by parliamentary inertia, 
as well as by a circumspect regard for their prescriptive 
rights, to a due observance of the customary law. The 
force of precedent is notoriously strong on the lower levels 
of culture. Under the rule of the elders deference to 
precedent grows into an inveterate habit in the young, 
and when presently these come to take their turn as 
discretionary elders the habit of deference to the pre- 


46 


The Instincts of Workmanship 


cedents established by those who have gone before still 
binds them, and the life and thought of the community 
never escape the dead hand of the parent. 

When worked out into an institution of control in 
this way, and crossed with the other instinctive propen¬ 
sities that go to make governmental authority, it is ap¬ 
parently unavoidable that the parental bent should 
suffer this curious inversion. In the simplest and un¬ 
sophisticated terms, its functional content appears to be 
an unselfish solicitude for the well-being of the incoming 
generation—a bias for the highest efficiency and fullest 
volume of life in the group, with a particular drift to the 
future; so that, under its rule, contrary to the dictum of 
the economic theorists, future goods are preferred to 
present goods 1 and the filial generation is given the 

1 Current economic theory commonly proceeds on the “hedonistic 
calculus”, so called, (cf. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles 
of Morals and Legislation ) or the “hedonic principle”, as it has also been 
called, (cf. Pantaleoni, Pure Economics, ch. i). This “principle” affords 
the major premise of current theory. It postulates that individual self- 
seeking is the prime mover of all economic conduct. There is some un¬ 
certainty and disagreement among latterday economists as to the precise 
terms proper to be employed to designate this principle of conduct and 
its working-out; in the apprehension of later speculators Bentham’s 
“pleasure and pain” has seemed too bald and materialistic, and they 
have had recourse to such less precise and definable terms as “gratifica¬ 
tion,” “satisfactions,” “sacrifice,” “utility” and “disutility,” “psychic 
income,” etc., but hitherto without any conclusive revision of the ter¬ 
minology. These differences and suggested innovations do not touch the 
substance of the ancient postulate. Proceeding on this postulate the 
theoreticians have laid down the broad proposition that “present goods 
are preferred to future goods”; from which arise many meticulous diffi¬ 
culties of theory, particularly in any attempt to make the deliverances 
of theory square with workday facts. The modicum of truth contained 
in this proposition would appear to be better expressed in the formula: 
“Prospective security is preterred to prospective risk;” which seems to 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 47 

preference over the parental generation in all that touches 
their material welfare. But where the self-regarding 
sentiments, self-complacency and self-abasement, come 
largely into play, as they are bound to do in any culture 
that partakes appreciably of a predatory or coercive 
character, the prerogatives of the ruling class and the 
principles of authentic usage become canons of truth 
and right living and presently take precedence of work¬ 
manlike efficiency and the fulness of life of the group. 
It results that conventional tests of validity presently 
accumulate and increasingly deflect and obstruct the 


be nearly all that is required either as a generalisation of the human mo¬ 
tives in the case or as a premise for the theoretical refinements aimed at, 
whereas the dictum that “present goods are preferred to future goods” 
must, on reflection, commend itself as substantially false. By and large, 
of course, goods are not wanted except for prospective use—beyond the 
measure of that urgent current consumption that plays no part in the 
theoretical refinements for which the dictum is invoked. It will imme¬ 
diately be apparent on reflection that even for the individual’s own ad¬ 
vantage “present goods are preferred to future goods” only where and 
in so far as property rights are secure, and then only for future use. It 
is for productive use in the future, or more particularly for the sake of 
prospective revenue to be drawn from wealth so held, by lending or in¬ 
vesting it, that such a preference becomes effective. Apart from this 
pecuniary advantage that attaches to property held over from the present 
to the future there appears to be no such preference even as a matter 
of individual self-seeking, and where such pecuniary considerations are 
not dominant there is no such preference for “present goods.” It is 
present “wealth,” not present “goods,” that is the object of desire; and 
present wealth is desired mainly for its prospective advantage. It is 
well known that in communities where there are habitually no business¬ 
like credit extensions or investments for profit, savings take the form of 
hoarding, that is, accumulation for future use in preference to present 
consumption. There might be some division of opinion as to the char¬ 
acter of the prospective use for which goods are sought, but there can be 
little question that much, if not most, of this prospective use is not of a 
self-regarding character and is not sought from motives of sensuous gain. 


48 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


naive pursuit of workmanlike efficiency, in large part by 
obscuring those matters of fact that lend themselves to 
technological insight. 

But like other innate predispositions the parental bent 
continually reasserts itself in its native and untaught 
character, as an ever resilient solicitude for the welfare 
of the young and the prospective fortunes of the group. 
As such it constantly comes in to reenforce the instinct 
of workmanship and sustain interest in the direct pursuit 
of efficiency in the ways and means of life. So closely in 
touch and so concurrent are the parental bent and the 
sense of workmanship in this quest of efficiency that it 
is commonly difficult to guess which of the two proclivi¬ 
ties is to be credited with the larger or the leading part 
in any given line of conduct; although taken by and 
large the two are after all fairly distinct in respect of 
their functional content. This thorough and far-going 
concurrence of the two may perhaps be taken to mean 
that the instinct of workmanship is in the main a pro¬ 
pensity to work out the ends which the parental bent 
makes worth while. 

It seems to be these two predispositions in conjunction 
that have exercised the largest and most consistent con¬ 
trol over that growth of custom and conventional prin¬ 
ciples that has standardised the life of mankind in society 
and so given rise to a system of institutions. This con¬ 
trol bears selectively on the whole range of institutions 
created by habitual response to the call of the other 
instincts and has the effect of a “common-sense” sur¬ 
veillance which prevents the scheme of life from running 
into an insufferable tangle of grotesque extravagances. 
That their surveillance has not always been decisive 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 49 

need scarcely be specifically called to mind; human cul¬ 
ture in all ages presents too many imbecile usages and 
principles of conduct to let anyone overlook the fact that 
disserviceable institutions easily arise and continue to 
hold their place in spite of the disapproval of native 
common sense. The selective control exercised over 
custom and usage by these instincts of serviceability is 
neither too close nor too insistent. Wide, even extrava¬ 
gant, departures from the simple dictates of this native 
common sense occur even within the narrow range of the 
domestic and minor civil institutions, where these two 
common-sense predispositions should concur to create a 
prescriptive usage looking directly to the continuation 
and welfare of the race. Considerations, or perhaps 
rather conventional preconceptions, running on other 
grounds, as, for instance, on grounds of superstition or 
religion, of propriety and gentility, of pecuniary or 
political expediency, have come in for a large share in 
ordering the institutions of family and neighbourhood 
life. Yet doubtless it is the parental bent and the sense 
of workmanship in concurrence that have been the prim¬ 
ary and persistent factors in (selectively) shaping the 
household organisation among all peoples, however great 
may have been the force of other factors, instinctive and 
habitual, that have gone to diversify the variegated 
outcome. 

It appears, then, that so long as the parental solicitude 
and the sense of workmanship do not lead men to take 
thought and correct the otherwise unguarded drift of 
things, the growth of institutions—usage, customs, canons 
of conduct, principles of right and propriety, the course 

of cumulative habituation as it goes forward under the 

/ 


50 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


driving force of the several instincts native to man,— 
will commonly run at cross purposes with serviceability 
and the sense of workmanship. 1 

That such should be the case lies in the nature of 
things, as will readily appear on reflection. Under given 
circumstances and under the impulsion of a given in¬ 
stinctive propensity a given line of behaviour becomes 
habitual and so is installed by use and wont as a principle 
of conduct. The principle or canon of conduct so gained 
takes its place among the habitual verities of life in the 
community and is handed on by tradition. Under further 
impulsion of the same and other instinctive propensities, 
and under altered circumstances, conduct in other, unre¬ 
lated lines will be referred to this received principle as a 
bench-mark by which its goodness is appraised and to 
which all conduct is accommodated, giving a result which 
is related to the exigencies of the case only at the second 
remove and by channels of habit which have only a 
conventional relevancy to the case. The farther this 
manner of crossing and grafting of habitual elements 
proceeds in the elaboration of principles and usage, the 


1 Traditionally a theoretical presumption has been held to the contrary. 
It has been taken for granted that the institutional outcome of men’s 
native dispositions will be sound and salutary; but this presumption 
overlooks the effects of complication and deflection among instincts, due 
to cumulative habit. The tradition has come down as an article of un¬ 
critical faith from the historic belief in a beneficent Order of Nature; 
which in turn runs back to the early-modern religious conception of a 
Providential Order instituted by a shrewd and benevolent Creator; 
which rests on an anthropomorphic imputation of parental solicitude and 
workmanship to an assumed metaphysical substratum of things. This 
traditional view therefore is substantially theological and has that degree 
of validity that may be derived from the putative characteristics of any 
anthropomorphic divinity. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 51 

larger will be the mass and the graver will be the com¬ 
plication of materially irrelevant considerations present 
in any given line of conduct, the more extensive and 
fantastic will be the fabric of conventionalities which 
come to condition the response to any one of the innate 
human propensities, and the more “ irrelevant, incompe¬ 
tent and impertinent” will be the line of conduct pre¬ 
scribed by use and wont. Except by recourse to the 
sense of workmanship there is no evading this complica¬ 
tion of ineptitudes and irrelevancies, and such recourse 
is not easily had. For the bias of settled habit goes to 
sustain the institutional fabric of received sophistica¬ 
tions, and these sophistications are bound in such a net¬ 
work of give and take that a disturbance of the fabric 
at any point will involve more or less of a derangement 
throughout. 

This body of habitual principles and preconceptions 
is at the same time the medium through which experience 
receives those elements of information and insight on 
which workmanship is able to draw in contriving ways 
and means and turning them to account for the uses of 
life. And the conventional verities count in this con¬ 
nexion almost wholly as obstructions to workmanlike 
efficiency. Worldly wisdom, insight into the proprieties 
and expediencies of human intercourse, the scheme of 
tabus, consanguinities, and magical efficacies, yields 
very little that can effectually be turned to account for 
technological ends. The experience gained by habitua¬ 
tion under the stress of these other proclivities and their 
derivative principles is necessarily made use of in work¬ 
manship, and so enters into the texture of the technologi¬ 
cal system, but a large part of it is of very doubtful value 


5 2 


The Instinct of Worhnanship 


for the purpose. Much of this experience runs at cross 
purposes with workmanship, not only in that the puta¬ 
tive information which this experience brings home to 
men has none but a putative serviceability, but also in 
that the habit of mind induced by its discipline obscures 
that insight into matter of fact that is indispensable to 
workmanlike efficiency. 

But the most obstructive derangement that besets 
workmanship is what may be called the self-contamina¬ 
tion of the sense of workmanship itself. This applies in 
a peculiar degree to the earlier or more elementary phases 
of culture, but it holds true only with lessening force 
throughout the later growth of civilisation. The hind¬ 
rance to technological efficiency from this source will 
often rise to large proportions even in advanced com¬ 
munities, particularly where magical, religious or other 
anthropomorphic habits of thought are prevalent. The 
difficulty has been spoken of as anthropomorphism, or 
animism,—which is only a more archaic anthropomor¬ 
phism. The essential trait of anthropomorphic concep¬ 
tions, so far as bears on the present argument, is that 
conduct, more or less fully after the human fashion of 
conduct, is imputed to external objects; whether these 
external objects are facts of observation or creatures 
of mythological fancy. Such anthropomorphism com¬ 
monly means an interpretation of phenomena in terms 
of workmanship, though it may also involve much more 
than this, particularly in the higher reaches of myth¬ 
making. But the simpler anthropomorphic or animistic 
beliefs that pervade men’s every-day thinking commonly 
amount to little if anything more than the naive imputa- 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 53 

tion of a workmanlike propensity in the observed facts. 
External objects are believed to do things; or rather it 
is believed that they are seen to do things. 

The reason of this imputation of conduct to external 
things is simple, obvious, and intimate in all men’s ap¬ 
prehension; so much so, indeed, as not readily to permit 
its being seen in perspective and appreciated at anything 
like its effectual force. All facts of observation are neces¬ 
sarily seen in the light of the observer’s habits of thought, 
and the most intimate and inveterate of his habits of 
thought is the experience of his own initiative and en¬ 
deavours. It is to this “ apperception mass ” that objects 
of apperception are finally referred, and it is in terms of 
this experience that their measure is finally taken. No 
psychological phenomenon is more familiar than this 
ubiquitous “personal equation” in men’s apprehension 
of whatever facts come within their observation. 

The sense of workmanship is like all human instincts 
in the respect that when the occasion offers, the agent 
moved by its impulse not only runs through a sequence 
of actions suitable to the instinctive end, but he is also 
given to dwelling, more or less sentimentally, on the 
objects and activities about which his attention is en¬ 
gaged by the promptings of this instinctive propensity. 
In so far as he is moved by the instinct of workmanship 
man contemplates the objects with which he comes in 
contact from the point of view of their relevancy to ul¬ 
terior results, their aptitude for taking effect in a conse¬ 
quential outcome. Habitual occupation with workman¬ 
like conceptions,—and in the lower cultures all men and 
women are habitually so occupied, since there is no con¬ 
siderable class or season not engaged in the quest of a 


54 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


livelihood,—this occupation with workmanlike interests, 
leaving the attention alert in the direction towards 
workmanlike phenomena, carries with it habitual think¬ 
ing in the terms in which the logic of workmanship runs. 
The facts of observation are conceived as facts of work¬ 
manship, and the logic of workmanship becomes the 
logic of events. Their apprehension in these terms is 
easy, since it draws into action the faculties of apper¬ 
ception and reflection that are already alert and facile 
through habitual use, and it assimilates the facts in an 
apperceptive system of relationships that is likewise 
ready and satisfactory, convincing through habitual 
service and by native proclivity to this line of systematis¬ 
ation. By instinct and habit observed phenomena are 
apprehended from this (teleological) point of view, and 
they are construed, by way of sytematisation, in terms 
of such an instinctive pursuit of some workmanlike end. 
In latterday psychological jargon, human knowledge is 
of a “pragmatic” character. 

As all men habitually act under the guidance of in¬ 
stincts, and therefore by force of sentiment instinctively 
look to some end in all activity, so the objects with which 
the primitive workman has to do are also conceived as 
acting under impulse of an instinctive kind; and a bent, 
a teleological or pragmatic nature, is in some degree 
imputed to them and comes as a matter of course to be 
accepted as a constituent element in their apprehended 
make-up. A putative pragmatic bent innate in external 
things comes in this way to pass current as observed 
matter of fact. By force of the sense of workmanship 
external objects are in great part apperceived in respect 
of what they will do; and their most substantial charac- 









Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology ^5 

teristic therefore, their intimate individual nature, in 
so far as they are conceived as individual entities, is 
that they will do things. 

In the workmanlike apprehension of them the nature 
of things is twofold: (a) what can be done with them as 
raw material for use under the creative hand of the work¬ 
man who makes things, and ( h ) what they will do as 
entities acting in their own right and working out their 
own ends. The former is matter of fact, the latter matter 
of imputation; but both alike, and in the naive appre¬ 
hension of uncritical men both equally, are facts of ob¬ 
servation and elements of objective knowledge. The 
two are, of course, of very unequal value for the purposes 
of workmanship. It should seem, at least on first con¬ 
tact with the distinction, that the former category alone 
can have effectually conduced or contributed to work¬ 
manlike efficiency, and so it should be the only substan¬ 
tial factor in the growth of technological insight and 
proficiency; while the latter category of knowledge 
should presumably have always been an unmitigated 
hindrance to effective work and to technological advance. 
But such does not appear on closer scrutiny to have 
been the case in the past; whether such sheer discrimina¬ 
tion against the technological serviceability of all these 
putative facts would hold good in latter-day civilisation is 
a question which may perhaps best be left to the parties 
in interest in “p ragm atic” and theological controversy. 

These two categories of knowledge, or of cognoscenda, 
are incongruous, of course, and they seem incompatible 
when applied to the same phenomena, the same external 
objects. But such incongruity does not disturb anyone 
who is at all content to take facts at their face value,— 




56 The Instinct of Workmanship 

for both ways of apprehending the facts are equally given 
in the face value of the facts apprehended. And on the 
known lower levels of culture it appears that in the work¬ 
man’s apprehension of the facts with which he has to 
do there is no evident strain due to this twofold nature 
and twofold interpretation of the objects of knowledge. 
So, for instance, the Pueblo potter (woman) may (puta¬ 
tively) be aware of certain inherent, quasi-spiritual, 
pragmatic qualities, claims and proclivities personal to 
the clay beds from which her raw material is drawn; 
different clay beds have, no doubt, a somewhat different 
quasi-personality, which has, among other things, to do 
with the goodness of the raw material they afford. Even 
the clay in hand will have its pragmatic peculiarities and 
idiosyncracies which are duly to be respected; and, 
notably, the finished pot is an entity with a life-history 
of its own and with temperament, fortunes and fatalities 
that make up the substance of good and evil in its world. 1 
But all that does not perceptibly affect the technology 
of the Pueblo potter’s art, beyond carrying a sequence 
of ceremonial observance that may run along by the 
side of the technological process; nor does it manifestly 
affect the workmanlike use of the pot during its life¬ 
time, except that the pragmatic nature of the given pot 
will decide, on grounds of ceremonial competency, to 
what use it may be put. 2 Matter of fact and matter of 

1 Cf., e. g., F. H. Cushing, “A Study of Pueblo Pottery as illustrative 
of Zuni Culture Growth,” Report, Bureau of Ethnology, 1882-1883 
(vol. iv); J. W. Fewkes, “Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895,” 
sections on “Pottery” and “Paleography of the Pottery,” ibid , 1896- 
1897 (vol. xviii); W. H. Holmes, “The Ancient Art of Chiriqui,” ibid, 
1884-1885 (vol. vi). 

2 The restrictions in this respect are mainly those which devote the 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 57 

imputation run along side by side in inextricable con¬ 
tact but with slight apparent mutual interference across 
the line. The potter digs her clay as best she has learned 
how, and it is a matter of workmanlike efficiency, in 
which empirical knowledge of the mechanical qualities 
of the material is very efficiently combined with the pot¬ 
ter’s trained proficiency in the discretionary use of her 
tools; the tools, of course, also have their (putative) 
temperamental idiosyncracies, but they are employed 
in her hands in uncritical conformity with such matter-of- 
fact laws of physics as she has learned. The clay is 
washed, kneaded and tempered with the same circum¬ 
spect regard to the opaque facts known about clay 
through long handling of it. What and how much tem¬ 
pering material may best be used, and how it is to be 
worked in, may all have a recondite explanation in the 
subtler imputed traits of the clay; a certain clay may 
have a putative quasi-spiritual affinity for certain tem¬ 
pering material; but the work of selection and mixing is 
carried out with a watchful regard to the mechanical 
character of the materials and without doubt that the 
given materials will respond in definite, empirically 
ascertained ways to the pressure brought on them by 
the potter’s hands, and without questioning the matter 
of fact that such and so much of manipulation will mix 
such and so much of tempering material with the given 
lot of clay. The clay is “as wax in her hands;” what 
comes of it is the product of her insight and proficiency. 
Still the pragmatic nature of all these materials viewed 
as distinct entities is never to be denied, and in those 

“sacred” vessels, distinguished by peculiar shapes and decorations, to 
particular ceremonial uses. 


58 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


respects in which she does not creatively design, manipu¬ 
late and construct the work of her hands, its putative 
self-sufficiency of existence, meaning and propensity 
goes on its own recognisances unshorn and inalienable. 

Technological efficiency rests on matter-of-fact knowl¬ 
edge, as contrasted with knowledge of the traits imputed 
to external objects in making acquaintance with them. 
Therefore every substantial advance in technological 
mastery necessarily adds something to this body of 
opaque fact, and with every such advance proportion- 
ably less of the behaviour of inanimate things will come 
to be construed in terms of an imputed workmanlike or 
teleological bent. At the same time the imputation of 
a teleological meaning or workmanlike bent to the ex¬ 
ternal facts that are made use of is likely to take a more 
circumspect, ingenious and idealised form. Under the 
circumstances that condition an increasing technological 
mastery there is an evergrowing necessity to avoid con¬ 
flict between the imputed traits of external objects and 
those facts of their behaviour that are constantly in evi¬ 
dence in their technological use. In so far, therefore, 
as a simple and immediate imputation of workmanlike 
self-direction is seen manifestly to traverse the facts of 
daily use its place will be supplied by more shadowy 
anthropomorphic agencies that are assumed to carry on 
their life and work in some degree of detachment from 
the material objects in question, and to these anthropo¬ 
morphic agencies which so lie obscurely in the back¬ 
ground of the observed facts will be assigned a larger and 
larger share of the required initiative and self-direction. 
For so alien to mankind, with its instinctive sense of 
workmanship, is the mutilation of brute creation into 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 59 

mere opaque matter-of-fact, and so indefeasibly does the 
“ consciousness of kind ” assert itself, that each successive 
renunciation of such an imputed bias of workmanship in 
concrete objects is sought to be redeemed by pushing the 
imputation farther into the background of observed 
phenomena and running their putative workmanlike 
bias in more consummately anthropomorphic terms. So 
an animistic conception 1 of things comes presently to 
supplement, and in part supplant, the more naive and 
immediate imputation of workmanship, leading up to 
farther and more elaborate myth-making; until in the 
course of elaboration and refinement there may emerge a 
monotheistic and providential Creator seated in an in¬ 
finitely remote but ubiquitous space of four dimensions. 

This imputation of bias and initiative has doubtless 
lost ground among civilised communities, as contrasted 
with the matter-of-fact apprehension of things, so that 
where it once was the main body of knowledge it now is 
believed to live and move only within that margin of 
things not yet overtaken by matter-of-fact information,— 
at least so it is held in the vainglorious scepticism of the 
Western culture. Meantime it is to be noted that the 
proclivity to impute a workmanlike bias to external 
facts has not been lost, nor has it become inoperative 
even among the adepts of Occidental scepticism. On 
the one hand it still enables the modern scientist to 
generalise his observations in terms of causation, 2 and 
on the other hand it has preserved the life of God the 
Father unto this day. It is as the creative workman, the 

1 Cf. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture , especially ch. xvii. 

2 Cf. “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” University oj 
California Chronicle , Oct., 1908. 


6o 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


Great Artificer, that he has taken his last stand against 
the powers of spiritual twilight. 

Out of the simpler workday familiarity with the raw 
materials and processes employed in industry, in the 
lower cultures, there emerges no system of knowledge 
avowed as such; although in all known instances of such 
lower cultures the industrial arts have taken on a sys¬ 
tematic character, such as often to give rise to definite, 
extensive and elaborate technological processes as well 
as to manual and other technological training; both of 
which will necessarily involve something like an elemen¬ 
tary theory of mechanics systematised on grounds of 
matter-of-fact, as well as a practical routine of empirical 
ways and means. In the lower cultures the growth of 
this body of opaque facts and of its systematic coherence 
is simply the habitual growth of technological procedure. 
Considered as a knowledge of things it is prosy and un¬ 
attractive; it does not greatly appeal to men’s curiosity, 
being scarcely interesting in itself, but only for the use 
to be made of it. Its facts are not lighted up with that 
spiritual fire of pragmatic initiative and propensity which 
animates the same phenomena when seen in the light of 
an imputed workmanlike behaviour and so construed in 
terms of conduct. On the other hand, when the phe¬ 
nomena are interpreted anthropomorphically they are 
indued with a “ human interest,” such as will draw the 
attention of all men in all ages, as witness the worldwide 
penchant for myth-making. 

Such animistic imputation of end and endeavour to the 
facts of observation will in no case cover the whole of 
men’s apprehension of the facts. It is a matter of impu¬ 
tation, not of direct observation; and there is always a 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 61 

fringe of opaque matter-of-fact bound up with even the 
most animistically conceived object. S uch is unavoidably 
the case. The animistic conception imputes to its sub¬ 
ject a workmanlike propensity to do things, and such an 
imputation necessarily implies that, as agent, the object 
in question engages in something like a technological 
process, a workmanlike manipulation wherein he has his 
will with the raw materials upon which his workmanlike 
force and proficiency spends itself. Workmanship in¬ 
volves raw material, and in the respect in which this raw 
material is passively shaped to his purposes by the 
workman’s manipulation it is not conceived to be ac¬ 
tively seeking its own ends on its own initiative. So 
that by force of the logic of workmanship the imputation 
of a workmanlike (animistic) propensity to brute facts, 
itself involves the assumption of crude inanimate matter 
as a correlate of the putative workmanlike agent. The 
anthropomorphic fancy of the primitive workman, 
therefore, can never carry the teleological interpretation 
of phenomena to such a finality but that there will always 
in his apprehension be an inert residue of matter-of-fact 
left over. The material facts never cease to be, within 
reasonable limits, raw material; though the limits may 
be somewhat vague and shifting. And this residue of 
crude matter-of-fact grows and gathers consistency with 
experience and always remains ready to the hand of the 
workman for what it is worth, unmagnified and unbeau¬ 
tified by anthropomorphic interpretation. 

The animistic, or better the anthropomorphic, elements 
so comprised by imputation in the common-sense appre¬ 
hension of things will pass in the main for facts of ob¬ 
servation. With the current of time and experience this 


62 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


may under favourable conditions grow into a developed 
animistic system and come to the dignity of myth, and 
ultimately of theology. But as it plays its part in the 
cruder uses of technology its common and most obstruc¬ 
tive form is the inchoate animism or anthropomorphic 
bias spoken of above. In its bearing on technological 
efficiency, it commonly vitiates the available facts in a 
greater or less degree. Matter-of-fact knowledge alone 
will serve the uses of workmanship, since workmanship 
is effective only in so far as its outcome is matter-of-fact 
work. Any higher and more subtle potencies found in 
or imputed to the facts about which the artificer is en¬ 
gaged can only serve to divert and defeat his efforts, in 
that they lead him into methods and expedients that 
have only a putative effect. 

This obstructive force of the anthropomorphic inter¬ 
pretation of phenomena is by no means the same in all 
lines of activity. The difficulty, at least in the earlier 
days, seems to be greatest along those lines of craft where 
the workman has to do with the mechanical, inanimate 
forces—the simplest in point of brute concreteness and 
the least amenable to a consistent interpretation in 
animistic terms. While man is conventionally distin¬ 
guished from brute creation as a “ tool-using animal,” 
his early progress in the devising and use of efficient tools, 
taking the word in its native sense, seems to have gone 
forward very slowly, both absolutely and as contrasted 
with those lines of workmanship in which he could carry 
his point by manual dexterity unaided by cunningly 
devised implements and mechanical contrivances; 1 and 

1 So, e. g., the proficiency of Bushmen, Veddas, Australians, American 



Contamination oj Instincts in Primitive Technology 63 

still more striking is the contrast between the incredibly 
slow and blindfold advance of the savage culture shown 
in the sequence of those typical stone implements which 
serve conventionally as land-marks of the early tech¬ 
nology, on the one hand, and the concomitant achieve¬ 
ments of the same stone-age peoples in the domestication 
and use of plants and animals on the other hand. 

No man can offer a confident conjecture as to how long 
a time and what a volume of experience was taken up in 
the growth of technological insight and proficiency up 
to the point when the neolithic period begins in European 
prehistory. In point of duration it has been found con¬ 
venient to count it up roughly in units of geologic time, 
where a thousand years are as a day. Attempts to reduce 
it to such units as centuries or millennia have hitherto not 
come to anything appreciable. In the present state of in¬ 
formation on this head it is doubtless a safe conjecture 
that the interval between the beginning of the human era 
and the close of palaeolithic time, say in Europe or within 
the cultural sequence in which Europe belongs, is to be 
taken as some multiple of the interval that has elapsed 
from the beginning of the neolithic culture in Europe 
to the present; 1 and the neolithic period itself was in its 
turn no doubt of longer duration than the history of 
Europe since the bronze first came in. 2 

Indians, and other peoples of a low technological plane, in tracking game 
has been remarked on with great admiration by all observers; and the 
efficiency of these and others of their like is no less admirable as regards 
swimming, boating, riding, climbing, stalking, etc. 

1 Cf. G. and A. de Mortillet, Le Prehislorique, especially the chapter 
“Donnees chronologiques,” pp. 662-664; W. G. Sollas, Ancient Hunters , 
ch. i and xiv. 

2 Cf. Sophus Muller, VEurope Prehislorique. 


6 4 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


The series of stone implements recovered from palaeo¬ 
lithic deposits show the utmost reach of palaeolithic 
technology on its mechanical side, in the way of work¬ 
manlike mastery of brute matter simply; for these 
implements are the tools of the tool-makers of that 
technological era. They indicate the ultimate terms of 
the technological situation on the mechanical side, for 
the craftsman working in more perishable materials 
could go no farther than these primary elements of the 
technological equipment would carry him. 

The strict limitation imposed on the technology of 
any culture, on its mechanical side, by the “ state of the 
industrial arts” in respect of the primary tools and ma¬ 
terials available, whether availability is a question of 
knowledge or of material environment, is illustrated, 
for instance, by the case of the Eskimo, the North-west 
Coast Indians, or some of the islands of the South Sea. 
In each of these cultures, perhaps especially in that of 
the Eskimo, technological mastery had been carried as 
far as the circumstances of the case would permit, and 
in each case the decisive circumstances that limit the 
scope and range of workmanship are the character of 
the primary tools of the tool-maker and the limits of his 
knowledge of the mechanical properties of the materials 
at his disposal for such use. The Eskimo culture, for 
instance, is complete after its kind, worked out to the 
last degree of workmanlike mastery possible with the 
Eskimo’s knowledge of those materials on which he de¬ 
pended for his primary tools and on which he was able 
to draw for the raw materials of his industry. At the 
same time the Eskimo shows how considerable a super¬ 
structure of the secondary mechanic arts may be erected 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 65 

on a scant groundwork of the primary mechanical re¬ 
sources. 1 

In the light of such a familiar instance as the Eskimo 
or the Polynesian culture it is evident that very much 
must be allowed, in the case, e. g., of the European stone 
age, for work in perishable materials that have disap¬ 
peared; but after all allowance of this kind, the showing 
for palaeolithic man is not remarkable, considering the 
ample time allowed him, and considering also that, in 
Europe at least, he was by native gift nowise inferior to 
some of the racial elements that still survive in the exist¬ 
ing population and that are not notoriously ill furnished 
either in the physical or the intellectual respect. And 
what is true of palaeolithic times as regards the native 
character of this population is true in a more pronounced 
degree for later prehistoric times. 2 

The very moderate pace of the technological advance 
in early times in the mechanic arts stands out more 
strikingly when it is contrasted with what was accom- 

1 Cf., e. g., Report of Bureau of American Ethnology, 1884-1885, Franz 
Boas, “The Central Eskimo;’’ ibid, 1887-1888, John Murdoch, “The 
Point Barrow Eskimo.” 

2 What is assumed here is what is commonly held, viz. that the racial 
stocks that made up the late palaeolithic population of Europe are still 
represented in a moderate way in the racial mixture that fills Europe 
today, and that these older racial types not only recur sporadically in the 
European population at large but are also present locally in sufficient 
force to give a particular character to the population of given localities. 
(See G. de Mortillet, Formation de la nation franqaise, 4me partie, and 
Conclusions, pp. 275-329.) Great changes took place in the racial com¬ 
plexion of Europe in the beginning and early phases of the neolithic 
period, but since then no intrusion of new stocks has seriously disturbed 
the mixture of races, except in isolated areas, of secondary consequence 
to the cultural situation at large. 

See also W. G. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives . 


66 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


plished in those arts, or rather in those occupations, that 
have to do immediately with living matter. Some of 
the crop plants, for instance, and presently some of the 
domestic animals, make their appearance in Denmark 
late in the period of the kitchen middens; which falls in 
the early stone age of the Danish chronology, that is to 
say in the early part of the neolithic period as counted 
in terms of the European chronology at large. These, 
then, are improved breeds of plants and animals, very 
appreciably different from their wild ancestors, arguing 
not only a shrewd insight and consistent management 
in the breeding of these domesticated races but also a 
long continued and intelligent use of these items of 
technological equipment, during which the nature and 
uses of the plants and animals taken into domestication 
must have been sufficiently understood and taken ad¬ 
vantage of, at the same time that a workmanlike selec¬ 
tion and propagation of favourable variations was carried 
out. Some slight reflection on what is implied in the suc¬ 
cessful maintenance, use and improvement of several 
races of crop plants and domestic animals will throw 
that side of the material achievements of the kitchen- 
midden peoples into sufficiently high contrast with their 
chipped flint implements and the degree of mechanical 
insight and proficiency which these implements indicate. 

To this Danish illustrative case it may of course be 
objected, and with some apparent reason, that these 
plants and animals which begin to come in evidence in a 
state of domestication in the kitchen middens, and which 
presently afforded the chief means of life to the later 
stone-age population, were introduced in a domestic 
state from outside; and that this technological gain was 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 67 

the product of another and higher culture than that into 
which they were thus intruded. The objection will have 
what force it may; the facts are no doubt substantially 
as set forth. However, the domestication and use of 
these races of plants and animals embodied no less con¬ 
siderable a workmanlike mastery of its technological 
problem wherever it was worked out, whether in Den¬ 
mark—as is at least highly improbable—or in Turkestan, 
as may well have been the case. And the successful 
introduction of tillage and cattle-breeding among the 
kitchen-midden peoples from a higher culture, without 
the concomitant introduction of a corresponding gain in 
the mechanic arts from the same source, leaves the force 
of the argument about as it would be in the absence of 
this objection. The comparative difficulty of acquiring 
the mechanic arts, as compared with the arts of hus¬ 
bandry, would appear in much the same light whether 
it were shown in the relatively slow acquirement of these 
arts through a home growth of technological mastery or 
in the relatively tardy and inept borrowing of them from 
outside. So far as bears on the present question, much 
the same habits of mind take effect in the acquirement 
of such a technological gain whether it takes place by 
home growth or by borrowing from without. In either 
case the point is that the peoples of the kitchen-middens 
appear to have been less able to learn the use of service¬ 
able mechanical expedients than to acquire the tech¬ 
nology of tillage and cattle-breeding. The appearance 
of tillage and cattle-breeding (“mixed farming”) at this 
period of Danish prehistory, without the concomitant 
appearance of anything like a similar technological gain 
in the mechanic arts, argues either (a) that in the culture 


68 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


from which husbandry was ultimately borrowed and in 
which the domestication was achieved there was no simi¬ 
larly substantial gain made in the mechanic arts at the 
same time, so that this culture from which the crop 
plants and animals originally came into the North of 
Europe had no corresponding mechanical gain to offer 
along with husbandry; or (b) that the kitchen-midden 
peoples, and the other peoples through whose hands the 
arts of husbandry passed on their way to the North, were 
unable to profit in a like degree by what was offered them 
in the primary mechanic arts. The known evidence 
seems to say that the visible retardation in the mechanic 
arts, as compared with husbandry, in prehistoric Den¬ 
mark was due partly to the one, partly to the other of 
these difficulties. 

To avoid confusion and misconception it may be per¬ 
tinent to recall that, taken absolutely, the rate and mag¬ 
nitude of advance in the primary mechanic arts in Den¬ 
mark at this time was very considerable; so much so 
indeed that the visible absolute gain in this respect has 
so profoundly touched the imagination of the students of 
that culture as to let them overlook the disparity, in 
point of the rate of gain, between the mechanic arts and 
husbandry. In the same connection it is also to be re¬ 
marked that the entire neolithic culture of the kitchen 
middens, as well as their husbandry, was introduced 
from outside of Europe, having been worked out in its 
early rudiments before the kitchen-midden peoples 
reached the Baltic seaboard. At the same time the raw 
materials for the mechanic arts of the neolithic culture 
were available to the kitchen-midden technologist in 
abundant quantity and unsurpassed quality; while the 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 69 

raw material of husbandry, the crop plants and domestic 
animals, were exotics. Further, in point of race, and 
therefore presumably in point of native endowment, the 
peoples of the Baltic seaboard at that time were substan¬ 
tially the same mixture of stocks that has in modern 
times carried the technology of the mechanic arts in 
western Europe and its colonies to a pitch of mastery 
never approached before or elsewhere. And the retarda¬ 
tion in the mechanic arts as contrasted with husbandry 
is no greater, probably less, in neolithic Denmark than 
in any other culture on the same general level of effi¬ 
ciency. 

Wherever the move may have been made, in one or in 
several places, and whatever may have been the par¬ 
ticular circumstances attending the domestication and 
early use of crop plants and animals, the case sums up to 
about the same result. Through long ages of work and 
play men (perhaps primarily women) learned the diffi¬ 
cult and delicate crafts of husbandry and carried their 
mastery of these pursuits to such a degree of proficiency, 
and followed out the lead given by these callings with 
such effect, that by the (geologic) date of early neolithic 
times in Europe virtually all the species of domesticable 
animals in three continents had been brought in and had 
been bred into improved races. 1 At the same time the 
leading crop plants of the old world, those on whose 
yield the life of the Western peoples depends today, had 

1 These improved races are commonly, if not always, a product of 
hybridisation, though it is conceivable that such a race might arise as a 
“sport,” a Mendelian mutant. To establish such a race or “composite 
pure line” of hybrids and to propagate and improve it in the course of 
further breeding demands a degree of patient attention and consistent 
aim. 


70 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


been brought under cultivation, improved and specialised 
with such effect that all the advance that has been made 
in these respects since the early neolithic period is greatly 
less than what had been accomplished up to that time. 
By early neolithic times as counted in West Europe, or 
by the early bronze age as counted in western Asia, the 
leading domestic animals had been distributed, in domes¬ 
ticated and improved breeds, throughout central and 
western Asia and the inhabited regions of Europe and 
North Africa. The like is true for the main crop plants 
that now feed the occidental peoples, except that these, 
in domesticated and specialised breeds, were distributed 
through this entire cultural region at an appreciably 
earlier date,—earlier by some thousands of years. 1 In 

1 The late neolithic, or “aeneolithic,” culture brought to light by Pum- 
pelly at Anau in Transcaspia shows the synchronism of advance between 
the technology of the mechanic arts on the one hand and of tillage and 
cattle-breeding on the other hand in a remarkably lucid way. The site 
is held to date back to some 8000 B. C. or earlier, and shows continuous oc¬ 
cupation through a period of several thousand years. The settlers at 
Anau brought cereals (barley and wheat) when the settlement was made; 
so that the cultivation of these grains must date back some considerable 
distance farther into the stone age of Asia. In succeeding ages the people 
of Anau made some further advance in the use of crop plants; whether by 
improvement and innovation at home or by borrowing has not been de¬ 
termined. Presently, in the course of the next few thousand years, they 
brought into domestication and adapted to domestic use by selective 
breeding the greater number of those species of animals that have since 
made up the complement of live stock in the Western culture. In the 
mechanic arts the visible advance is slight as compared with the work in 
cattle-breeding, though it cannot be called insignificant taken by itself. 
The more notable improvements in this direction are believed to be due 
to borrowing. Perhaps the most characteristic trait of the mechanic 
technology at Anau is the total absence of weapons in the lower half of 
the deposits.—Raphael Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan: Prehistoric 
Civilizations of Anau. (Carnegie Publication No. 73.) Washington, 
1908. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 71 

M •“? 

late modern times there have been added to the civilised 
world’s complement of crop plants a very large and im¬ 
portant contingent whose domestication and develop¬ 
ment was worked out in America and the regions of the 
Pacific; though most of these belong in the low latitudes 
and are on that account less available to the Western 
culture than what has come down from the prehistoric 
cultures of the old world. These are also the work of the 
stone age, in large part no doubt dating back to palaeo¬ 
lithic times. 

America, with the Polynesian and Indonesian cultural 
regions, shows the correlation and the systematic dis¬ 
crepancy in time between the rate, range and magnitude 
of the advance in tillage on the one hand and of the 
primary mechanic arts on the other hand. When this 
culture was interrupted it had, in the mechanical re¬ 
spect, reached an advanced neolithic phase at its best; 
but its achievements in the crop plants are perhaps to 
be rated as unsurpassed by all that has been done else¬ 
where in all time. 1 In the primary mechanic arts this 
cultural region had in the same time reached a stage of 
perfection comparable at its best with pre-dynastic 
Egypt, or neolithic Denmark, or pre-Minoan Crete. 
The really great advance achieved was in the selection, 
improvement, use and cultivation of the crop plants; and 
not in any appreciable degree even in the mechanical 
appliances employed in the cultivation and consumption 
of these crops; though something considerable is to be 
noted in this latter respect in such inventions as the man- 

1 Cf. O. F. Cook, “Food Plants of Ancient America.” Report of Smith¬ 
sonian Institution , 1903. E. J. Payne, History of the New World Call** 
America, vol. i, (1892), pp. 336-427. 


72 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


dioca squeezer and the metate; and great things were 
done in the way of irrigation and road building. 1 But 
the contrast, for instance, between the metate and the 
contrivances for making paper-bread on the one side, and 
the technologically consummate corn-plant (maize) on 
the other, should be decisive for the point here in ques¬ 
tion. The mechanic appliances of corn cultivation had 
not advanced beyond the digging stick, a rude hoe and 
a rudimentary spade, though here as well as in other 
similar connections the local use of well-devised irrigation 
works, terraced fields, 2 and graneries is not to be over¬ 
looked; but the corn itself had been brought from its 
grass-like ancestral form to the maize of the present corn 
crop. Like most of the American crop plants the maize 
under selective cultivation had been carried so far from 
its wild form as no longer to stand a chance of survival 
in the wild state, and indeed so far that it is still a matter 
of controversy what its wild ancestor may have been. 

Perhaps the races of this American-Polynesian region 
are gifted with some special degree of spiritual (instinc¬ 
tive) fitness for plant-breeding. They seem to be en¬ 
dowed with a particular proclivity for sympathetically 
identifying themselves with and patiently waiting upon 
the course of natural phenomena, perhaps especially the 
phenomena of animate nature, which never seem alien 
or incomprehensible to the Indian. Such at least is the 
consistent suggestion carried by their myths, legends 
and symbolism. The typical American cosmogony is a 
tissue of legends of fecundity and growth, even more 
than appears to hold true of primitive cosmogonies 

1 Cf. E. J. Payne, as above. 

2 Cf., e. g., Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, vol. i, ch. vL 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 73 

elsewhere. 1 And yet some caution in accepting such a 
generalisation is necessary in view, for instance, of the 
mythological output along similar lines on the Mediter¬ 
ranean seaboard in early times. By native gift the Indian 
is a a nature-faker, ?? given to unlimited anthropomor¬ 
phism. Mechanical, matter-of-fact appreciation of ex¬ 
ternal and material phenomena seems to be in a peculiar 
degree difficult, irrelevant and incongruous with the 
genius of the race. But even if it should seem that this 
race, or group of races, is peculiarly given to such sym¬ 
pathetic interpretaion of natural phenomena in terms of 
human instinct, the difference between them and the 
typical racial stocks of the old world in this respect is 
after all a difference in degree, not in kind. The like 
proclivity is in good evidence throughout, wherever any 
race of men have endeavoured to put their acquaintance 
with natural phenomena into systematic form. The 
bond of combination in the making of systems, whether 
cosmologic, mythic, philosophic or scientific, has been 
some putative human trait or traits. It may be that in 
their appreciation of facts and their making of systems 
the American races have by some peculiar native gift 
been inclined to an interpretation in terms of .fertility, 
growth, nurture and life-cycles. 

Any predisposition freely to accept and use the de¬ 
liverances of sensible perception on their own recog¬ 
nisances simply, in the terms in which they come, and 

1 Cf., e. g., J. W. Powell, “Mythology of the North American Indians,” 
Report, Bureau of Eth., 1879-1880 (vol. i); F. H. Cushing, “Outlines of 
Zuni Creation Myths,” ibid, 1891-1892; J. O. Dorsey, “A Study of 
Siouan Cults,” ibid, 1889-1890. 


74 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


to connect them up in a system of knowledge in their 
own terms, without imputation of a spiritual (anthropo¬ 
morphic) substratum,—for the purposes of workmanship 
such a predisposition should be of the first importance 
for effective work in the mechanic arts; and a strong in¬ 
stinctive bias to the contrary should be correspondingly 
pernicious. Any instinctive bias to colour, distort and 
derange the facts by imputing elements of human nature 
will unavoidably act to hinder and deflect the agent from 
an effectual pursuit of mechanical design. But the like 
is not true in the same degree as regards men’s dealings 
with animate nature. Anthropomorphic interpretation 
is more at home and less disserviceable here. With less 
serious derangement in the objective results, plants and 
animals may be construed to have a conscious purpose 
in life and to pursue their ends somewhat after the human 
fashion; witness the facility with which the story-tellers 
recount plausible episodes (feigned or real) from the life 
of animals and plants, and the readiness with which such 
tales get a hearing. Readers and hearers find no great 
difficulty, if any, in giving make-believe credence to the 
tales so long as they recount only such adventures as 
are physically possible to the animals of which (whom?) 
they are told; the hearers are always ready to go with 
the story-teller down this highway of make-believe into 
the subhuman fairy land. Mechanical phenomena, hap¬ 
penings in the mechanic arts, characteristics of the exist¬ 
ence of inanimate objects and the changes which they 
undergo, lend themselves with much less happy effect to 
the anthropomorphic story-teller’s make-believe. Epi¬ 
sodes from the feigned life-history of tools, machines and 
raw materials are not drawn on with anything like the 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 75 

same frequency, nor do the tales that recount them meet 
with the same untiring attention. There is always an 
unreality about them which even the most robust make- 
believe can overcome only for a short and doubtful 
interval. Witness the relative barrenness of primitive 
folk-tales on this inanimate side, as compared with the 
exuberance of the myths and legends that interpret the 
life of plants and animals; and where inanimate phenom¬ 
ena are drawn into the net of personation it happens 
almost unavoidably that a feigned person is thrown into 
the foreground of the tale plausibly to take the part of 
bearer, controller or intrigant in the episodes related. 1 

Even more to the same purpose, as showing the same 
insidious facility of anthropomorphic interpretation, are 
the bona-fide constructions of scientists and pseudo¬ 
scientists running on the imputation of purpose and de¬ 
liberation to explain the behaviour of animals. Indeed, 
at the worst, and still in good faith, it may go so far as 
to impute some sort of quasi-conscious striving on the 
part of plants. 2 As good and temperate an instance as 
may be had of such anthropomorphic imputation of 
workmanlike gifts is afforded, for instance, by the work 
of Romanes on the behaviour of animals. 3 It goes to 
show how very plausibly some of the lower animals may 
be credited with these spiritual aptitudes and how far 
and well the imputation may be made to serve the scien- 

1 Witness, again, the tales collected under the caption of The Day's 
Work , where the anthropomorphic romance of mechanics is made the 
most of by the same master who told the tales of the Jungle Book and of 
“The Cat that Walked by Himself.” 

2 Cf. Presidential Address by Francis Darwin at the Dublin meeting 
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; cf. also H. 
Bergson, Evolution creatrice, and particularly passages that deal with the 
&an vital. 

.. 9 Cf. G. J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence, especially the Introduction. 


76 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tist’s end. So plausible, indeed, is this anthropomor¬ 
phism as to disarm even the scepticism of the trained 
sceptic. It will also appear in the later course of this 
inquiry that anthropomorphism, and especially the 
imputation of workmanship, has borne a much greater 
part in the work of the scientists than the members of 
that craft would like to avow; so that the scientific use of 
the anthropomorphic fancy is by no means a unique 
distinction of Romanes and the large group or school of 
biologists of which his work is typical; nor does the 
presence of this bias in their work by any means strip it 
of scientific value. In point of fact, it seems to touch 
the substance of their objective results much less seri¬ 
ously than might be apprehended. 

The modern scientist’s watchward is scepticism and 
caution; and what he may be led to do concessively, in 
spite of himself, by too broad a consciousness of kind, 
the savage does joyously and with conviction. His 
measure of what he sees about him is himself, and his 
apprehension of what takes place is a comprehension of 
how such things would be done in the course of human 
conduct if they were physically possible to man. The 
man (more often perhaps the woman) who busies himself 
with the beginnings of plant and animal breeding will 
sympathetically put himself in touch with their inclina¬ 
tions and aptitudes with a degree of intimacy and as¬ 
surance never approached by the followers of Romanes. 
It is for him to use common sense and fall in with the 
drift and idiosyncracies of these others who are, mys¬ 
teriously, denied the gift of speech. By the unambiguous 
leading of the anthropomorphic fancy he puts himself 
in the place of his ward, his animal or vegetable friend 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 77 

and cousin, and can so learn something of what is going 
on in the putative vegetable or animal mind, through 
patient observation of what comes to light in response 
to his attentions in the course of his joint life with them. 
The plant or animal manifestly does things, and the ques¬ 
tion follows, Why do these speechless others do those 
things which they are seen to do?—things which often 
do not lie within the range of things desirable to be ac¬ 
complished, humanly speaking. Manifestly these non¬ 
human others seek other ends and seek them in other 
ways than man. Some of the objective results which it 
lies in their nature to accomplish in so working out their 
scheme of life are useful to their human cousins; and it 
stands to reason that when they are dealt kindly with, 
when man takes pains to further their ends in life, they 
will take thought and respond somewhat in kind. To 
turn the proposition about, those things which men 
find, by trial and error, to bring a good and kindly re¬ 
turn from the speechless others are manifestly well re¬ 
ceived by them and must obviously be of a kind to fall 
in with their bent and minister to their inclinations; and 
prudence and fellow-feeling combine to lead men farther 
along the way so indicated at each move in the propitious 
direction. 

To the unsophisticated—and even to the sophisticated 
sceptic—it is manifest that animate objects do things. 
What they aim to do, as well as the logic of their conduct 
in carrying out their designs, are not precisely the same 
as in the case of man. But by staying by and learning 
what they are bent on doing, and observing how they 
go about it, any peculiarity in the nature of their needs, 
spiritual and physical, and in their manner of approach- 


78 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


ing their ends, may be learned and assimilated; and their 
life-work can be furthered and amplified by judiciously 
ministering to their ascertained needs and making the 
way smooth for them in what they undertake, so long 
as their undertakings are such as man is interested in 
bringing to a successful issue. Of course they work 
toward ends that are good in their sight, though not 
always such as men would seek; but that is their affair 
and is not to be pried into beyond the bounds of a decent 
neighbourly interest. And they work by methods in some 
degree other, often wiser, than those of men, and these 
it is man’s place to learn if he would profit by their com¬ 
panionship. 

Much of the scheme of life of these speechless others 
is a scheme of fecundity, growth and nurture, and all 
these matters are natural to women rather than to men; 
and so in the early stages of culture the consciousness of 
kind and congruity has made it plain to all the parties in 
interest that the care of crops and animals belongs in the 
fitness of things to women. Indeed there is such a spirit¬ 
ual (magical) community between women and the fecun¬ 
dity of animate things that any intrusion of the men in the 
affairs of growth and fertility may by force of contrast 
come to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. Since 
the life of plants and animals is primarily of a spiritual 
nature, since the initiative and trend of vegetable and 
animal life is of this character, it follows that some sort 
of propitious spiritual contact and communion should 
be maintained between mankind and that world of fer¬ 
tility and growth in which these animate things live and 
move. So a line of communication, of a spiritual kind, 
is kept open with the realm of the speechless ones by 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 79 

means of a sign-language systematised into ritual, and 
by a symbolism of amity reenforced with gifts and pro¬ 
fessions of good-will. Hence a growth of occult meanings 
and ceremonial procedure, to which the argument will 
have to return presently. 1 

By this indirect, animistic and magical, line of ap¬ 
proach the matter-of-fact requirements of tillage and 
cattle-breeding can be determined and fulfilled in a very 
passable fashion, given only the necessary time and 
tranquillity. Time is by common consent allowed the 
stone-age culture in abundant measure; and common 
consent is coming, through one consideration and an¬ 
other, to admit that the requisite conditions of peace 
and quiet industry are also a characteristic feature of 
that early time. The fact, broad and profound, that the 
known crop plants and animals were for the most part 
domesticated in that time is perhaps in itself the most 
persuasive argument for the prevalence of peaceful con¬ 
ditions among those peoples, whoever they may have 
been, to whose efforts, or rather to whose routine of 
genial superstition, this domestication is to be credited. 
This domestication and use of plants and animals was 
of course not a mere blindfold diversion. Here as ever 
the instinct of workmanship was present with its prompt¬ 
ing to make the most of what comes to hand; and the 
technology of husbandry, like the technology of any other 
industrial enterprise, has been the outcome of men’s 
abiding penchant for making things useful. 

The peculiar advantage of tillage and cattle-breeding 

1 Cf. Jane E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion , es¬ 
pecially ch. iv; The same, Themis , especially ch. i, ii, iii and ix; with 
which compare the Pueblo cults referred to above- 


80 The Instinct of Workmanship 

over the primary mechanic arts, that by which the former 
arts gained and kept their lead, seems to have been the 
simple circumstance that the propensity of workmanlike 
men to impute a workmanlike (teleological) nature to 
phenomena does not leave the resulting knowledge of 
these phenomena so wide of the mark in the case of 
animate nature as in that of brute matter. It will prob¬ 
ably not do to say that the anthropomorphic imputa¬ 
tion has been directly serviceable to the technological 
end in the case of tillage and cattle-breeding; it is 
rather that the disadvantage or disserviceability of such 
an interpretation of facts has been greater in the me¬ 
chanic arts in early times. The instinct of workmanship, 
through the sentimental propensity to impute workman¬ 
like qualities and conduct to external facts, has defeated 
itself more effectually in the mechanic arts. And as in 
the course of time, under favourable local conditions, the 
habitual imputation of teleological capacities has in 
some measure fallen into disuse, the mechanic arts have 
gained; and every such gain has in its turn, as conditions 
permitted, acted cumulatively toward the discredit and 
disuse of the teleological method of knowledge, and 
therefore toward an acceleration of technological gain 
in this field. 

The inanimate factors which early man has to turn to 
account as a condition precedent to any appreciable 
advance in the industrial arts, outside of husbandry and 
of the use of fruits and fibres associated with it, do not 
lend themselves to an effectual approximation from the 
anthropomorphic side. Flint and similar minerals are 
refractory, they have no spiritual nature and no scheme 
or cycle of life that can be interpreted in some passable 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 81 

\ . 

t ; ' . 1 

fashion as the outcome of instinctive propensities and 

workmanlike management. Anthropomorphic insight 
does not penetrate into the secret ways of brute matter, 
for all the reasonable concession to idiosyncracies, to 
recondite conceits, occult means and devious methods, 
with which unsophisticated man stands ready to meet 
them. He can see as far into a millstone as anyone 
along that line; but that is not far enough to be of any 
use, and he is debarred by his workmanlike common 
sense from systematically looking into the matter along 
any other line. It is only the blindfold, unsystematic 
accretions of opaque fact coming in, disjointed and un¬ 
sympathetic, from the inhuman side of his technological 
experience that can help him out here. And experience 
of that kind can come upon him only inadvertently, 
for he has no basis on which to systematise these facts 
as they come, and so he has no means of intelligently 
seeking them. His intelligent endeavours to get at the 
nature of things will perforce go on the mass of knowl¬ 
edge which his intelligence has already comprehended, 
which is a knowledge of human conduct. Anthropo¬ 
morphism is almost wholly obstructive in this field of 
brute matter, and in early times, before much in the 
way of accumulated matter-of-fact knowledge had 
forced itself upon men, the propensity to a teleological 
interpretation seems to have been nearly decisive against 
technological progress in the primary and indispensable 
mechanic arts. And in later phases of culture, where 
anthropomorphic interpretations of workmanship have 
been worked out into a rounded system of magic and 
religion, they have at times brought the technological 
advance to a full stop, particularly on the mechanical 


82 


The Instinct oj Workmanship 


side, and have even led to the cancelment of gains that 
should have seemed secure. 

It is likewise a notable fact that, as already intimated 
above, myth and legend have found this brute matter 
as refractory in their service as the instinct of workman¬ 
ship has found it in the genesis of technology; and for 
the good reason that the same human penchant for teleo¬ 
logical insight and elaboration has ruled in the one as 
in the other. Inanimate matter and the phenomena in 
which inanimate matter manifests its nature and force 
have, of course, taken a large place in folk-lore; but the 
folk-lore, whether myth, legend or magic, in which in¬ 
animate matter is conceived as speaking in its own right 
and working out its own spiritual content is relatively 
very scant. In magic it commonly plays a part as an 
instrumentality only, and indeed as an instrument which 
owes its magical efficacy to some efficacious circumstance 
external to it. It has most frequently an induced rather 
than intrinsic efficacy, being the vehicle whereby the 
worker of magic materialises and conveys his design to 
its execution. It is susceptible of magical use, rather 
than creative of magical effects . 1 No doubt this charac¬ 
terisation of the magical offices of inert matter applies 
to early and primitive times and situations rather than 
to the high-wrought later systems of occult science and 
alchemical lore that are built on some appreciable knowl¬ 
edge of metallurgy and chemical reactions. So likewise 
early myth and legend have had to take recourse to the 
intervention of personal, or at least animate agents, to 
make headway in the domain of brute matter, which 

1 Cf., e. g., Skeat, Malay Magic, perhaps especially ch. v, section on the 
cultivation of rice. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 83 

l .-' v ' * ■ 

figures commonly as means in the hands of manlike 
agents of some sort, rather than as a self-directing agent 
with initiative and a natural bent of its own. The 
phenomena of inanimate nature are likely to be thrown 
into the hands of such putative agents, who are then 
conceived to control them and turn them to account for 
ulterior ends not given in the native character of the 
inanimate objects themselves. 1 Even so exceptionally 
available a range of phenomena as those of fire have 
not escaped this inglorious eventuality. In the mythical 
legends of fire it will be found that the fire and all its 
works come into the plot of the story only as secondary 
elements, and the interest centres about the fortunes of 
some manlike agency to whose initiative and exploits 
all the phenomena of fire are referred as their cause or 
occasion. 2 The legends of fire have commonly become 
legends of a fire-bringer, etc., 3 and have come to turn 
about the plots and counterplots of anthropomorphic 
beasts and divinities who are conceived to have wrestled 
for, with and about the use of fire. 

1 Hence animism, which applies its conceptions to inanimate rather 
than animate objects. 

2 The like applies in the case of the seasonal and meteorological myths; 
where it happens rarely if at all that the phenomena of the seasons or the 
forces that come in evidence in meteorological changes are personified 
directly or unambiguously. It is always some god or daemon that con¬ 
trols or uses the wind and the weather, some indwelling sprite or manlike 
giant that inhabits and watches over the hill or spring or river, and it 
is always the interests of the indwelling personality rather than that of 
the tangible objects in the case that are to be safeguarded by the super¬ 
stitious practices with which the myth surrounds men’s intercourse with 
these features of the landscape. 

3 As in the legends of Prometheus; compare legends and ritual of fire 
from various cultures in L. Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, ch. xxv- 


?CXV11. 


8 4 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


So, on the other hand, as an illustration from the side 
of technology, to show how matters stood in this connec¬ 
tion through the best days of anthropomorphism, fire 
had been in daily and indispensable use through an in¬ 
definite series of millennia before men, in the early mod¬ 
em times of Occidental civilisation, learned the use of a 
chimney. And all that hindered the discovery of this 
simple mechanical expedient seems to have been the 
fatal propensity of men to impute a teleological nature 
and workmanlike design to this phenomenon with which 
no truce or working arrangement can be negotiated in 
spiritual terms. 1 

A doubt may plausibly suggest itself as to the com¬ 
petency of such an explanation of these phenomena. It 
would seem scarcely to lie in the nature of an instinct of 
workmanship to enlist the workman in the acquisition 
of knowledge which he cannot use, and guide him in 
elaborating it into a system which will defeat his own 
ends; to build up obstructions to its own working, and 
yet in the long run to overcome them. In part this 
discrepancy in the outcome arises from the fact that the 
sense of workmanship affords a norm of systematisation 
for the facts that come into knowledge. This leads to 
something like a dramatisation of the facts, whereby they 
fall into some sort of a sequence of conduct among them- 

1 For an interesting illustration of this point see a paper by Duncan 
Mackenzie on “Cretan Palaces” in the Annual of the British School at 
Athens for 1907-1908, where the whole discussion hangs on the fact, un¬ 
questioned by any one of the disputants in a wide and warm controversy, 
that during some centuries of unwholesome nuisance from smoky fires 
in draughty rooms the great civilisation of the Mediterranean seaboard 
never hit on the ready solution of the difficulty by putting in a chimney. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 85 

selves, become personalised, are conceived as gifted with 
discrimination, inclinations, preferences and initiative; 
and in so far as the facts are conceived to be involved in 
immaterial or hyperphysical relations of this character 
they cannot effectually be made use of for the purposes 
of technology. All conceptions that exceed the scope of 
material fact are useless for technology, and in so far as 
such conceptions are intruded into the body of informa¬ 
tion drawn on by the workman they become obstructive. 

But in good part the discrepancies of the outcome are 
due to complications with an instinctive curiosity, the 
presence of which has tacitly been assumed throughout 
the argument,—an “idle” curiosity by force of which 
men, more or less insistently, want to know things, when 
graver interests do not engross their attention. Com¬ 
paratively little has been made of this instinctive pro¬ 
pensity by the students of culture, though the fact of 
its presence in human nature is broadly recognised by 
psychologists, 1 and the like penchant comes in evidence 
among the lower animals, as appears in many investiga¬ 
tions of animal behaviour. 2 Indeed, it has been taken 
somewhat lightly, in a general way, as being a genial 
infirmity of human nature rather than a creative factor 
in civilisation. And the reason of its being dealt with 
in so slight a manner is probably to be found in the nature 
of the instinct itself. With the instinct of workmanship 
it shares that character of pliancy and tractability com¬ 
mon in some degree to the whole range of instincts, and 
especially characteristic of those instinctive predisposi- 

1 Cf., e. g., W. James, Principles of Psychology , ch. xxiv; McDougaU, 
Social Psychology , ch. iii. 

2 Cf., e. g., M. F. Washburn, The Animal Mindy ch. xii, xiii. 


S6 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tions that distinguish human nature from the simpler 
and more refractory spiritual endowment of the lower 
animals. 

Like the other instinctive propensities, it is to be pre¬ 
sumed, the idle curiosity takes effect only within the 
bounds of that metabolic margin of surplus energy that 
comes in evidence in all animal life, but that appears in 
larger proportions in the “higher” animals and in a 
peculiarly obtrusive manner in the life of man. It seems 
to be only after the demands of the simpler, more imme¬ 
diately organic functions, such as nutrition, growth and 
reproduction, have been met in some passably sufficient 
measure; that this vaguer range of instincts which con¬ 
stitutes the spiritual predispositions of man can effec¬ 
tually draw on the energies of the organism and so can 
go into effect in what is recognised as human conduct. 
The wider the margin of disposable energy, therefore, the 
more freely should the characteristically human predis¬ 
positions assert their sway, and the more nearly this 
metabolic margin is drained by the elemental needs of 
the organism the less chance should there be that conduct 
will be guided by what may properly be called the spirit¬ 
ual needs of man. It is accordingly characteristic of 
this whole range of vaguer and less automatically deter¬ 
minate predispositions that they transiently yield some¬ 
what easily to the pressure of circumstances. This is 
eminently true of the idle curiosity, as it is also true in a 
somewhat comparable degree of the sense of workman¬ 
ship. But these instincts at the same time, and perhaps 
by the same fact, have also the other concomitant and 
characteristically human trait of a ubiquitous resiliency 
whenever and in so far as there is nothing to hinder. 



Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 87 

j 

Their staying power is, in a way, very great, though 
their driving force is neither massive nor intractable. 
So that even though the idle curiosity, like the sense of 
workmanship, may be momentarily thrust aside by more 
urgent interests, yet its long-term effects in human cul¬ 
ture are very considerable. Men will commonly make 
easy terms with their curiosity when there is a call to 
action under the spur of a more elemental need, and 
even when circumstances appear to be favourable to its 
untroubled functioning a sustained and consistent re¬ 
sponse to its incitement is by no means an assured con¬ 
sequence. The common man does not eagerly pursue the 
quest of the idle curiosity, and neither its guidance nor 
its award of fact is mandatory on him. 1 Sporadic indi¬ 
viduals who are endowed with this supererogatory gift 
largely in excess of the common run, or who yield to 
its enticements with very exceptional abandon, are ac¬ 
counted dreamers, or in extreme cases their more sensible 
neighbours may even rate them as of unsound mind. But 
the long-term consequences of the common run of curios¬ 
ity, helped out by such sporadic individuals in whom the 
idle curiosity runs at a higher tension, counts up finally, 
because cumulatively, into the most substantial cultural \ . 
achievement of the race,—its systematised knowledge 
and quasi-knowledge of things. 

This instinctive curiosity, then, comes in now and 
again serviceably to accelerate the gain in technological 
insight by bringing in material information that may be 
turned to account, as well as by persistently disturbing 
the habitual body of knowledge on which workmanship 

1 For illustrations see Dudley Kidd, The Essential Kafir , especially 
ch. ii, on “Native Beliefs.” 


88 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


■ n —* 

draws. Human curiosity is doubtless an “idle” pro¬ 
pensity, in the sense that no utilitarian aim enters in its 
habitual exercise; but the material information which 
is by this means drawn into the agent’s available knowl¬ 
edge may none the less come to serve the ends of work¬ 
manship. A good share of the facts taken cognisance of 
under the spur of curiosity is of no effect for workman¬ 
ship or for technological insight, and that any of it should 
be found serviceable is substantially a fortuitous cir¬ 
cumstance. This character of “idleness,” the absence 
of a utilitarian aim or utilitarian sentiment in the im¬ 
pulse of curiosity, is doubtless a great part of the reason 
for its having received such scant and rather slighting 
treatment at the hands of the psychologists and of the 
students of civilisation alike. 

Of the material so offered as knowledge, or fact, work¬ 
manship makes use of whatever is available. In ways 
already indicated this utilisation of ascertained “facts” 
is both furthered and hindered by the fact that the in¬ 
formation which comes to hand through the restless 
curiosity of man is reduced to systematic shape, for the 
most part or wholly, under canons of workmanship. For 
the large generality of human knowledge this will mean 
that the raw material of observed fact is selectively 
worked over, connected up and accumulated on lines 
of a putative teleological order of things, cast in some¬ 
thing like a dramatic form. From which it follows that 
the knowledge so gained is held and carried over from 
generation to generation in a form which lends itself 
with facility to a workmanlike manipulation; it is already 
digested for assimilation in a scheme of teleology that 
instinctively commends itself to the workmanlike sense 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 89 

of fitness. But it also follows that in so far as the per¬ 
sonalised, teleological, or dramatic order so imputed to 
the facts does not, by chance, faithfully reflect the causal 
relations subsisting among these facts, the utilisation of 
them as technological elements will amount to a bor¬ 
rowing of trouble. So that the concurrence of curiosity 
and workmanship in the assimilation of facts in this 
way may, and in early culture must, result in a retarda¬ 
tion of the technological advance, as contrasted with 
what might conceivably have been the outcome of this 
work of the idle curiosity if it had not been congenitally 
contaminated with the sense of workmanship and thereby 
lent itself to conceptions of magical efflcacy rather than 
to mechanical efficiency. 1 

The further bearing of the parental bent on the early 
growth of technology also merits attention in this con¬ 
nection. This instinct and the sentiments that arise out 
of its promptings will have had wide and free play in 
early times, when the common good of the group was 
still perforce the chief economic interest in the habitual 
view of all its members. It will have had an immediate 
effect on the routine of life and work, presumably far 
beyond what is to be looked for at any later stage. In 
the time when pecuniary competition had not yet be¬ 
come an institution, grounded in the ownership of goods 
in severalty and on their competitive consumption, the 
promptings of this instinct will have been more insistent 
and will have met with a more unguarded response than 

J Cf. “The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, 1 ” Journal 0] 
Sociology, March, 1906, pp. 585-609; “The Evolution of the Scientific 
Point of View,” University of California Chronicle , vol. x, pp. 396-415. j 


90 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


later on, after these institutional changes have taken 
effect. A manifest and inveterate distaste of waste, in 
great part traceable on analysis to this instinct, still per¬ 
sistently comes in evidence in all communities, although 
it is greatly disguised and distorted by the principles of 
conspicuous waste 1 among all those peoples that have 
adopted private ownership of goods; and serviceability 
to the common good likewise never ceases to command 
at least a genial, speculative approval from the common 
run of men, though this, too, may often take some gro¬ 
tesque or nugatory form due to preconceptions of a 
pecuniary kind. This bias for serviceability and against 
waste falls in directly with the promptings of the instinct 
of workmanship, so that these two instinctive predisposi¬ 
tions will reenforce one another in conducing to an im¬ 
personally economical use of materials and resources as 
well as to the full use of workmanlike capacities, and to 
an endless taking of pains. 

Some reference has also been made already to the 
technological value of those kindly, “humane” senti¬ 
ments that are bound up with the parental bent,—if 
they may not rather be said substantially to constitute 
the parental bent. It is of course in the non-mechanical 
arts of plant and animal breeding that these humane 
extensions of the parental instinct have their chief if not 
their only industrial value, both in furthering the day’s 
work and in contributing to the advance of technology. 
In the primary mechanic arts, e. g., an affectionate dis¬ 
position of this kind toward the inanimate appliances 
with which their work is occupied does no doubt still, 
as ever, to some extent animate the workmen as well 
1 Cf. Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. iv, v. 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 91 

as those who may have the remoter oversight of the 
work. But the part played by such humane sentiments 
is after all relatively slight in men’s dealings with brute 
matter, nor do they invariably conduce to expeditious 
work or to a hard-headed insight into the mechanics of 
those things with which this work has to do. In fact 
such tender emotions so placed may somewhat easily 
become a source of mischief, in a manner similar to the 
mischievous technological consequences of anthropo¬ 
morphism already spoken of. 

It is otherwise with the bearing of the parental bent on 
the arts of tillage and cattle-breeding. Here its prompt¬ 
ings are almost wholly serviceable to technological gain 
as well as to assiduous workmanship. The kindly senti¬ 
ments intrinsic to the parental bent are admirably in 
place in the care of plants and animals, and their good 
effects in so giving a propitious turn to the technology 
of early tillage and cattle-breeding are only re-enforced 
by the parental and workmanlike inclination to husband 
resources and make the most of what comes to hand. 
The particular turn given to the anthropomorphic bias 
by this line of preconceptions also is rather favourable 
than otherwise to a working insight into the requirements 
of the art. And it has had certain specific consequences 
for the early technology of husbandry, as well as for 
the early culture in which husbandry was the chief ma¬ 
terial factor, such as to call for a more circumstantial 
account. 

Under the canons of workmanship a teleological ani¬ 
mus—an instinctive or “spiritual” nature—is imputed 
to the plants and animals brought into domestication. 
The art of husbandry proceeds on the apprehended 



92 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


1 


needs and proclivities so imputed, and the technology 
of the craft therefore takes the form of a “ tendance ” 
designed to further these quasi-animistically conceived 
beings in whatever ends they have at heart by virtue of 
their natural bent, and to so direct this tendance upon 
them as will conduce to shaping their scheme of life in 
ways advantageous to man. Like other sentient beings, 
as is known to shrewd and unsophisticated man, they 
have spiritual needs as well as material needs, and they 
are putatively to be influenced by the attitude of their 
human cousins towards them and their conduct, in¬ 
terests, and adventures. Further, their life and comfort 
are manifestly conditioned by the run of the seasons 
and of the weather; various inclemencies are discouraging 
and discomforting to them, as to mankind, and other 
vicissitudes of rain and shine and tempest are of the 
gravest consequence to them for good or ill. Under these 
delicate circumstances it is incumbent on the keepers 
of crops and flocks to walk circumspectly and cultivate 
the good-will not only of their crops and flocks but also 
of the natural phenomena that count for so much in the 
life of the crops and flocks. These natural phenomena 
are of course also conceived anthropomorphically, in the 
sense that they too are seen to follow their natural bent 
and do what they will,—or perhaps more commonly 
what the personal agents will, in whose keeping these 
natural phenomena are conceived to lie; for unsophis¬ 
ticated man has no other available terms in which to 
conceive them and their behaviour than the terms of 
initiative, design and endeavour immediately given in 
his own conscious action. 

Now, as has already been said, the scheme of life of the 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 93 

crops and flocks is, at least in the main, and particularly 
in so far as it vitally and always interests their keepers, a 
scheme of fecundity, fertility and growth. But these 
matters, visibly and by conscious sentiment, pertain in a 
peculiarly intimate sense to the women. They are mat¬ 
ters in which the sympathetic insight and fellow-feeling 
of womankind should in the nature of things come very 
felicitously to further the propitious course of things. 
Besides which the life of the women falls in these same 
lines of fecundity, nurture and growth, so that their 
association and attendance on the flocks and crops should 
further the propitious course of things also by the subtler 
means of sympathetic suggestion. There is a magical 
congruity of great force as between womankind and the 
propagation of growing things. And these subtler ways 
of influencing events are especially to the point in all 
contact with these non-human sentient beings, since 
they are speechless and must therefore in the main be 
led by living example rather than by precept and expostu¬ 
lation. And, again, being sentient, somewhat after the 
fashion of mankind, it is not to be believed that they 
have not the gift visibly common to mankind and many 
animals, of following their leader by force of sympathetic 
imitation. It may not be easy to say how far this in¬ 
stinctive impulse of imitation, necessarily credited to all 
phenomena to which anthropomorphic traits are im¬ 
puted, is to be accounted the ground of all sympathetic 
magic; but it is at least to be accepted as sufficient to 
account for much of what is done to induce fertility in 
flocks and crops. 

So that on many accounts it is evident that in the 
nature of things, the care of flocks and crops is the 


94 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


women's affair, and it follows that all intercourse with 
the flocks and crops in the early days had best be con¬ 
ducted by the women, who alone may be presumed in¬ 
tuitively to apprehend what is timely, due and permis¬ 
sible in these premises. It is all the more evident that 
communion with these wordless others should fall to the 
women, since the like wordless communion with their 
own young is perhaps the most notable and engaging 
trait of their own motherhood. The parental bent also 
throws a stress of sentiment on this simple and obvious 
phase of motherhood, such as has made it in all men’s 
apprehension the type of all kindly and unselfish tend¬ 
ance; at the same time this ubiquitous parental instinct 
tends constantly to place motherhood in the foreground 
in all that concerns the common good, in as much as all 
that is worth while, humanly speaking, has its beginning 
here. In that early phase of culture in which the begin¬ 
nings of tillage and cattle-breeding were made and in 
which the common good of the group was still the chief 
daily interest about which men’s solicitude and fore¬ 
thought are habitually engaged, motherhood will always 
have been the central fact in the scheme of human 
things. So that in this cultural phase the parental bent 
and the sense of workmanship will have worked together 
to bring the women into the chief place in the technologi¬ 
cal scheme; and the sense of imitative propriety, as well 
as the recognised constraining force exercised by ex¬ 
ample and mimetic representation through the impulse 
of imitation, will have guided workmanship shrewdly to 
play up womankind and motherhood in an ever-growing 
scheme of magical observances designed to further the 
natural increase of flocks and crops. Where anthropo- 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 95 

morphic imputation runs free and with conviction, such 
observances, designed to act sympathetically on the 
natural course of phenomena, unavoidably become an 
integral feature of the technological scheme, no less in¬ 
dispensable and putatively no less efficacious to this end 
than the mechanical operations with which these ob¬ 
servances are associated. There is no practicable line of 
division to be drawn between sympathetic magic and 
anthropomorphic technology; and in the known cul¬ 
tures of this early type it is for the most part an open 
question whether the magical observances are to be 
accounted an adjunct to what we would recognise as 
the technological routine of the art, or conversely. The 
two are not commonly held apart as distinct categories, 
and both are efficacious and indispensable; and in both 
the felt efficacy runs on much the same grounds of im¬ 
puted anthropomorphic traits. 1 

On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, 
as well as by force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, 
women come to take the leading r 61 e in the industrial 
community of the early time, and the community’s 
material interests come to centre about them and their 
relation to the natural products of the fields; and since 
this interest bears immediately on the fecundity of the 
flocks and crops, it is particularly in their character of 
motherhood that the women come most vitally into the 
case. The natural produce on which the life of the group 
depends, therefore, will appertain to the women, in some 

1 This technological blend of manual labour with magical practice is well 
seen, for instance, in the Malay ritual of rice culture.—W. W. Skeat, 
Malay Magic , various passages dealing with the ceremonial of the plant¬ 
ing, growth and harvesting of the rice-crop. 


9 6 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


intimate sense of congruity, so that in the fitness of 
things this produce will properly come to the good of the 
community through their hands and will logically be 
dispensed somewhat at their discretion. So great is the 
reach of this logic of congruity that in the known cul¬ 
tures which show much reminiscence of this early tech¬ 
nological phase it is commonly possible to detect some 
remnant of such discretionary control of the natural 
produce by the women. And modern students, imbued 
with modern preconceptions of ownership and preda¬ 
ceous mastery, have even found themselves constrained 
by this evidence to discover a system of matriarchy and 
maternal ownership in these usages that antedate the 
institution of ownership. Conceivably, the usages grow¬ 
ing out of this preferential position of women in the 
technology and ritual of early husbandry will, now and 
again, by the uniform drift of habituation have attained 
such a degree of consistency, been wrought into so rigid 
a form of institutions, as to have been carried over into 
a later phase of culture in which the ownership of goods 
is of the essence of the scheme; and in such case these 
usages may then have come to be reconstrued in terms 
of ownership, to the effect that the ownership of agri¬ 
cultural products vests of right in the woman, the mother 
of the household. 

But if the magical-technological fitness and efficacy 
of women has led to the growth of institutions vesting 
the disposal of the produce in the women, in a more or 
less discretionary way, the like effect has been even 
more pronounced, comprehensive and lasting as regards 
the immaterial developments of the case. With great 
uniformity the evidence from the earlier peaceable agri- 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 97 
r h , • -• . . 

cultural civilisations runs to the effect that the primitive 
ritual of husbandry, chiefly of a magical character, is in 
the hands of the women and is made up of observances 
presumed to be particularly consonant with the phenom¬ 
ena of motherhood. 1 And presently, when the more 
elaborate phases of these magical rites of husbandry 
come, by further superinduction of anthropomorphism, 
to grow into religious observances and mythological 
tenets, the greater daimones and divinities that emerge 
in the shuffle are women, and again it is the motherhood 
of women that is in evidence. The deities, great and 
small, are prevailingly females; and the great ones among 
them seem invariably to have set out with being mothers. 

In the creation of female and maternal divinities the 
parental instinct has doubtless greatly re-enforced the 
drift of the instinct of workmanship in the same direc¬ 
tion. The female deities have two main attributes or 
characteristics because of which they came to hold their 
high place; they are goddesses of fertility in one way or 
another, and they are mothers of the people. It is 
perhaps unnecessary to hold these two concomitant at¬ 
tributions apart, as many if not most of the great deities 
claim precedence on both grounds. But the lower orders 
of female divinities in the matriarchal scheme of things 
divine will much more commonly specialise in fertility 
of crops than in maternity of the people. The number 
of divinities that have mainly or solely to do with fer¬ 
tility is greater than that of those which figure as mothers 
of the people, either locally or generally. And perhaps 
in the majority of cases there is some suggestive evidence 

1 Cf. J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, es¬ 
pecially ch, iv; J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, bk, i, ch. iii. 


g8 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


that the great female deities have primarily been god* 
desses of fertility having to do with the growth of crops— 
and, usually in the second place, of animals—rather than 
primarily mothers of the tribe; 1 which would suggest 
that their genesis and character is due to the canons of 
the sense of workmanship more than to the parental 
bent, although the latter seems to have had its part in 
shaping many of them if not all. 

The female divinities belong characteristically to the 
early or simpler agricultural civilisation, and what has 
been said goes to argue that they rest on technological 
grounds in the main; indeed, in their genesis and early 
growth, they are in good part of the nature of tech¬ 
nological expedients. They are at home with the female 
technology of early tillage especially, and perhaps only 
in the second place do they serve the magical and reli¬ 
gious needs of peoples given mainly to breeding flocks 
and herds; although it is to be noted that most of the 
greater known goddesses of the ancient Western world, 
as well as many of the minor ones, are also found to be 
closely related to various of the domestic animals. In 
America and the Far East, of course, any connection 

1 Such seems to be the evidence, for instance, for Cybele, Astarte 
(Aphrodite, Ishtar), Mylitta, Isis, Demeter (Ceres), Artemis, and for 
such doubtfully late characters as Hera (Juno),—see Harrison, Pro¬ 
legomena to the Study of Greek Religion; Frazer, Adonis , Attis, Osiris, 
and The Golden Bough. Quan-on may be a doubtfulcase, as possibly also 
Amaterazu. The evidence from such American instances as the great 
mother goddesses of the Pueblos and other Indian tribes runs perhaps 
the other way, or at the best it may leave the point in doubt. See, for 
instance, Matilda C. Stevenson, “The Zuni Indians,” Report Bureau o) 
American Ethnology , 1901-1902, section on “Mythology;” The same, 
ibid, 1889-1890, “The Sia;” Frank H. Cushing, ibid, 1891-1892, “Zufii 
Creation Myths,” 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology 99 

with the domestication of animals would appear im¬ 
probable. 

With a change of base, from this early husbandry to a 
civilisation in which the main habitual interest is of an¬ 
other kind, and in which the habitual outlook of men is 
less closely limited by the same anthropomorphic con¬ 
ceptions of nurture and growth, the goddesses begin to 
lose their preferential claim on men’s regard and fall 
into place as adjuncts or consorts of male divinities de¬ 
signed on other lines and built out of different materials 
and serving new ends. 1 But the hegemony of the mother 
goddesses has unquestionably been very wide-reaching 
and very enduring, as it should be to answer to the ex¬ 
tent in time and space of the civilisation of tillage as 
well as to its paramount importance in the life of man¬ 
kind, and as it is shown to have been by the archaeologi¬ 
cal and ethnological evidence. 

A further concomitant variation in the cultural scheme, 
associated with and presumably traceable to the same 
technological ground, is maternal descent, the counting 
of relationship primarily or solely in the female line. In 
the present state of the evidence on this head it would 
probably be too broad a proposition to say that the 
counting of relationship by^ the mother’s side is due 
wholly to preconceptions arising out of the technology 
of fertility and growth; and that it so is remotely a crea¬ 
ture of the instinct of workmanship; but it is at least 
equally probable that that ancient conceit must be aban¬ 
doned according to which the system of maternal descent 
arises out of an habitual doubt of paternity. The mere 

1 Cf., e. g., Frazer, Adonis , Altis, Osiris , bk. ii, ch. iii, bk. iii, ch. vi 
and xi. 


ioo The Instinct of Workmanship 

obvious congruity of the cognatic system as contrasted 
with the agnatic, has presumably had as much to do 
with the matter as anything, and under the rule of the 
primitive technology of tillage and cattle-breeding this 
obvious congruity of the cognate relationship will have 
been very materially re-enforced by the current precon¬ 
ceptions regarding the preferential importance of the 
female line for the welfare of the household and the 
community. And so long as that technological era lasted, 
and until the more strenuous culture of predation and 
coercion came on and threw the male element in the com¬ 
munity into the place of first consequence, maternal 
descent as well as the mother goddess appear to have 
held their own. 

It will have been noticed that through all this argu¬ 
ment runs the presumption that the culture which in¬ 
cluded the beginnings and early growth of tillage and 
cattle-breeding was substantially a peaceable culture. 
This presumption is somewhat at variance with the tra¬ 
ditional view, particularly with the position taken as a 
matter of course by earlier students of ethnology in the 
nineteenth century. Still it is probably not subject to 
very serious question today. As the evidence has ac¬ 
cumulated it has grown increasingly manifest that the 
ancient assumption of a primitive state of nature after 
the school of Hobbes cannot be accepted. The evidence 
from contemporary sources, as to the state of things in 
this respect among savages and many of the lower bar¬ 
barians, points rather to peace than to war as the habit¬ 
ual situation, although this evidence is by no means 
unequivocal; besides which, the evidence from these 


Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology ioi 

V 

contemporary lower cultures bears only equivocally on 
the point of first interest here,—viz., the antecedents of 
the Western civilisation. What is more to the point, 
though harder to get at in any definitive way, is the pre¬ 
history of this civilisation. Here the inquiry will perforce 
go on survivals and reminiscences and on the implications 
of known facts of antiquity as well as of certain features 
still extant in the current cultural scheme. 

It seems antecedently improbable that the domestica¬ 
tion of the crop plants and animals could have been 
effected at all except among peoples leading a passably 
peaceable, and presently a sedentary life. And the 
length of time required for what was achieved in remote 
antiquity in this respect speaks for the prevalence of 
(passably) peaceable conditions over intervals of time 
and space that overpass all convenient bounds of chro¬ 
nology and localisation. Evidence of maternal descent, 
maternal religious practices and maternal discretion in 
the disposal of goods meet the inquiry in ever increasing 
force as soon as it begins to penetrate back of the con¬ 
ventionally accepted dawn of history; and survivals and 
reminiscences of such institutions appear here and there 
within the historical period with increasing frequency 
the more painstaking the inquiry becomes. And that 
institutions of this character require a peaceable situa¬ 
tion for their genesis as well as for their survival is not 
only antecedently probable on grounds of congruity, 
but it is evidenced by the way in which they inconti¬ 
nently decay and presently disappear wherever the cul¬ 
tural situation takes on a predatory character or develops 
a large-scale civilisation, with a coercive government, 
differentiation of classes—especially in the pecuniary 


102 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


respect—warlike ideals and ambitions, and a considerable 
accumulation of wealth. 

Some further discussion of this early peaceable situa¬ 
tion will necessarily come up in connection with the 
technological grounds of its disappearance at the tran¬ 
sition to that predatory culture which has displaced it 
in all cases where an appreciably advanced phase of 
civilisation has been reached. 


CHAPTER III 

The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 

Technological knowledge is of the nature of a com¬ 
mon stock, held and carried forward collectively by the 
community, which is in this relation to be conceived as 
a going concern. The state of the industrial arts is a 
fact of group life, not of individual or private initiative 
or innovation. It is an affair of the collectivity, not a 
creative achievement of individuals working self-suffi¬ 
ciently in severalty or in isolation. In the main, the state 
of the industrial arts is always a heritage out of the past; 
it is always in process of change, perhaps, but the sub¬ 
stantial body of it is knowledge that has come down from 
earlier generations. New elements of insight and pro¬ 
ficiency are continually being added and worked into 
this common stock by the experience and initiative of 
the current generation, but such novel elements are 
always and everywhere slight and inconsequential in 
comparison with the body of technology that has been 
carried over from the past. 

Each successive move in advance, every new wrinkle 
of novelty, improvement, invention, adaptation, every 
further detail of workmanlike innovation, is of course 
made by individuals and comes out of individual expe¬ 
rience and initiative, since the generations of mankind 
live only in individuals. But each move so made is 

necessarily made by individuals immersed in the com* 

103 


104 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


munity and exposed to the discipline of group life as it 
runs in the community, since all life is necessarily group 
life. The phenomena of human life occur only in this 
form. It is only as an outcome of this discipline that 
comes with the routine of group life, and by help of 
the commonplace knowledge diffused through the com¬ 
munity, that any of its members are enabled to make 
any new move that may in this way be traceable to their 
individual initiative. Any new technological departure 
necessarily takes its rise in the workmanlike endeavours 
of given individuals, but it can do so only by force of 
their familiarity with the body of knowledge which the 
group already has in hand. A new departure is always 
and necessarily an improvement on or alteration in that 
state of the industrial arts that is already in the keeping 
of the group at large; and every expedient or innovation, 
great or small, that so is hit upon goes into effect by 
going into the common stock of technological resources 
carried by the group. It can take effect only in this 
way. Such group solidarity is a necessity of the case, 
both for the acquirement and use of this immaterial 
equipment that is spoken of as the state of the industrial 
arts and for its custody and transmission from genera¬ 
tion to generation. 

Within this common stock of technology some special 
branch or line of proficiency, bearing on some special 
craft or trade, may be held in a degree of isolation by 
some caste-like group within the community, limited 
by consanguinity, initiation, and the like, and so it may 
be held somewhat out of the common stock and trans¬ 
mitted in some degree of segregation. In the lower cul¬ 
tures the elements of technology that are so engrossed 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 105 

by a fraction of the community and held out of the 
common stock are most commonly of a magical or cere¬ 
monial nature, rather than effective elements of work¬ 
manship; since any such matters of ritual observance 
lend themselves with greater facility to exclusive use 
and transmission within lines of class limitation than do 
the matter-of-fact devices of actual workmanship. In 
the lower cultures the exclusive training and informa¬ 
tion so held and transmitted in segregation by various 
secret organisations appear in the main to be of this 
magical or ceremonial character; 1 although there is no 
reason to doubt that this technological make-believe is 
taken quite seriously and counts as a substantial asset in 
the apprehension of its possessors. In a more advanced 
state of the industrial arts, where ownership and the 
specialisation of industry have had their effect, trade 
secrets, patent and copyrights are often of substantial 
value, and these are held in segregation from the common 
stock of technology. But it is evident without argu¬ 
ment that facts of this class are after all of no grave or 
enduring consequence in comparison with the great 
commonplace body of knowledge and skill current in the 
community. At the same time, any such segregated 
line of technological gain and transmission, if it has any 
appreciable significance for the state of the industrial 
arts and is not wholly made up of ritual observances, 
leans so greatly on the technological equipment at large 
that its isolation is at the most partial and one-sided; it 
takes effect only by the free use of the general body of 

1 Cf., e. g., Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, especially ch. 
iii, iv, v; Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia , ch. vii, 
viii, ix, xvi. 


io6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

knowledge which is not so engrossed, and it has also in 
all cases been acquired and elaborated only by the free 
use of that commonplace knowledge that is held in no 
man’s exclusive possession. Such is more particularly the 
case in all but those latest phases of the industrial de¬ 
velopment in which the volume of the technology and 
the consequent specialisation of occupations have been 
carried very far. 

In the earlier, or rather in all but the late phases of 
culture and technology, this immaterial equipment at 
large is accessible to all members of the community as a 
matter of course through the unavoidable discipline that 
comes with the workday routine of getting along. Few, 
if any, can avoid acquiring the essential elements of the 
industrial scheme by use of which the community lives, 
although they need not each gain any degree of profi¬ 
ciency in all the manual operations or industrial processes 
in which this technological scheme goes into effect, and 
few can avoid being so trained into the logic of the cur¬ 
rent scheme that their habitual thinking will in all these 
bearings run within the bounds of experience embodied 
in this general scheme. 

All have free access to this common stock of imma¬ 
terial equipment, but in all known cultures there is also 
found some degree of special training and some ap¬ 
preciable specialisation of knowledge and occupations; 
which is carried forward by expert workmen whose pe¬ 
culiar and exceptional proficiency is confined to some 
one or a few distinct lines of craft. And in all, or at least 
in all but the lowest known cultures, the available evi¬ 
dence goes to say that this joint stock of technological 
mastery can be maintained and carried forward only 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 


107 


by way of some such specialisation of training and dif¬ 
ferentiation of employments. No one is competent to 
acquire such mastery of all the lines of industry included 
in the general scheme as would enable him (or her) to 
transmit the state of the industrial arts to succeeding 
generations unimpaired at all points. 

Some degree of specialisation there always is, even 
where there appears to be no urgent technological need 
of it. The circumstances of their life differ sufficiently 
for different individuals, so that a certain individuation in 
workmanship will result from commonplace experience, 
even apart from any deliberate specialisation of occupa¬ 
tions. And with any considerable increase in the size 
of the group a more or less deliberate specialisation of 
occupations will also set in. Individuals who are in this 
way occupied wholly or mainly with some one particular 
line of work will carry proficiency in this line to a higher 
pitch than the generality of workmen and will bring out 
details of technological procedure that may never fully 
become the common possession of the group at large, 
that may not in all details become part of the common¬ 
place technological information current in the com¬ 
munity. There seems, in fact, never to have been a time 
when the industrial scheme was so slight and narrow 
that all members of the community could master it in 
the greatest feasible degree of proficiency at every point. 
But at the same time it holds true for all the more archaic 
phases of the development that all members of the com¬ 
munity appear always to have had a comprehensive and 
passably exhaustive acquaintance with the technique of 
all industries practised in their time. 

This necessary specialisation and detail training has 


io8 The Instinct cf Workmanship 

large consequences for the growth of technology as well 
as for its custody and transmission. It follows that a 
large and widely diversified industrial scheme is impos¬ 
sible except in a community of some size,—large enough 
to support a number and variety of special occupations. 
In effect, substantial gains in industrial insight and 
proficiency can apparently be worked out only through 
such close and sustained attention to a given line of 
work as can be given only within the lines of a specialised 
occupation. At the same time the industrial community 
must comprise a full complement of such specialised oc¬ 
cupations, and must also be bound together in a system 
of communication sufficiently close and facile to allow 
the technological contents of all these occupations to 
be readily assimilated into a systematic whole. The 
industrial system so worked out need not be of the same 
extent as any one local group of the people who get their 
living by its use; but it seems to be required that if 
several local groups are effectively to be comprised in a 
single industrial system conditions of peace must prevail 
among them. Community of language seems also to be 
nearly necessary to the maintenance of such a system. 
Where the various local groups are on hostile terms, each 
will tend to have an industrial system of its own, with a 
technological character somewhat distinct from its 
neighbours. 1 If the degree of isolation is pronounced, so 
that traffic and communication do not run freely be¬ 
tween groups, the size of the local group will limit the 
state of the industrial arts somewhat rigidly; and on the 
other hand a marked advance in the industrial arts, such 

1 Cf. for instance, Codrington, The Melanesians; Seligmann, The Mel- 
anesians of British New Guinea . 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 


109 

as the domestication of crop plants or animals or the 
introduction of metals, is likely to bring about such a 
redistribution of population and industry as to increase 
the effective size of the community. 1 

Among the peoples on the lower levels of culture there 
prevails commonly a considerable degree of isolation, or 
even of estrangement. In a great degree each com¬ 
munity is thrown on its own resources, and under these 
circumstances the size of the community may become 
a matter of decisive importance for the industrial arts. 
Where a serious decline in the numbers of any of these 
savage or barbarous peoples is recorded it is also com¬ 
monly noted that they have suffered a concomitant decay 


1 These considerations may of course imply nothing, directly, as to the 
size of the political organisation or of the national territory or population; 
though national boundaries are likely both to affect and to be affected 
by such changes in the industrial system. A community may be small, 
relatively to the industrial system in and by which it lives, and may yet, 
if conditions of peace permit it, stand in such a relation of complement or 
supplement to a larger complex of industrial groups as to make it in ef¬ 
fect an integral part of a larger community, so far as regards its tech¬ 
nology. So, for instance, Switzerland and Denmark are an integral 
part of the cultural and industrial community of the Western civilisation 
as effectually as they might be with an area and population equal to those 
of the United Kingdom or the German Empire, and they are doubtless 
each a more essential part in this community than Russia. At the same 
time, as things go within this Western culture, national boundaries have 
a very considerable obstructive effect in industrial affairs and in the 
growth of technology. It will probably be conceded on the one hand that 
any appreciable decline in the aggregate population of Christendom would 
result in some curtailment or retardation of the technological advance 
in which these peoples are jointly and severally engaged; and it is like¬ 
wise to be conceded on the other hand that the like effect would follow 
on any marked degree of success from the efforts of those patriotic and 
dynastic statesmen who are endeavouring to set these peoples asunder in 
an armed estrangement and neutrality. 


no 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


in their technological knowledge and workmanship. 1 In 
view of these considerations it is probably safe to say 
that under settled conditions any community is, com¬ 
monly, no larger than is required to keep up and carry 

I forward the state of the industrial arts as it runs. The 
known evidence appears to warrant the generalisation 
that the state of the industrial arts is limited by the size 
of the industrial community, and that whenever a given 
community is broken up or suffers a serious diminution 
of numbers its technological heritage will deteriorate and 
dwindle even though it may apparently have been 
meagre enough before. 

The considerations recited above are matters of com¬ 
monplace observation and might fairly be taken for 
granted without argument. But so much of current and 
recent theoretical speculation proceeds on tacit assump¬ 
tions at variance with these commonplaces that it seems 
pertinent to recall them, particularly since they will 
come in as premises in later passages of the inquiry. 

Given the material environment, the rate and charac¬ 
ter of the technological gains made in any community 
will depend on the initiative and application of its mem¬ 
bers, in so far as the growth of institutions has not seri¬ 
ously diverted the genius of the race from its natural 
bent; it will depend immediately and obviously on in¬ 
dividual talent for workmanship—on the workmanlike 

1 Cf., as an extreme case, Matilda C. Stevenson, “The Sia,” Report 
Bur. Eth., xi (1889-1890). 

The like decline is known to have occurred in many parts of Europe 
consequent on the decline of population due to the Black Death and 
the Plague, 



The Savage State of the Industrial Arts hi 

bent and capacity of the individual members of the 
community. Therefore any difference of native endow¬ 
ment in this respect between the several races will show 
itself in the character of their technological achieve¬ 
ments as well as in the rate of gain. Races differ among 
themselves in this matter, both as to the kind and as to 
the degree of technological proficiency of which they are 
capable. 1 It is perhaps as needless to insist on this 
spiritual difference between the various racial stocks as 
it would be difficult to determine the specific differences 
that are known to exist, or to exhibit them convincingly 
in detail. To some such ground much of the distinctive 
character of different peoples is no doubt to be assigned, 
though much also may as well be traceable to local 
peculiarities of environment and of institutional circum¬ 
stances. Something of the kind, a specific difference in 
the genius of the people, is by common consent assigned, 
for instance, in explanation of the pervasive difference in 
technology and workmanship between the Western cul¬ 
ture and the Far East. The like difference in “genius” 
is still more convincingly shown where different races 
have long been living near one another under settled 
cultural conditions. 2 

It should be noted in the same connection that hybrid 
peoples, such as those of Europe or of Japan, where 
somewhat widely distinct racial stocks are mingled, 
should afford a great variety and wide individual varia- 

1 On such native differences between the leading races of Europe, cf., 
e. g., G. V. de Lapouge, Les Selections Sociales; and VAryen; 0 . Ammon, 
Die Gesellschaftsordnung; G. Sergi, Arii e Ilalici. 

2 For instance, the Japanese and the Ainu, the Polynesians and the 
Melanesians, the Cinghalese and the Veddas. On the last named, cf. 
Seligmann, The Veddas. 


112 The Instinct of Workmanship 

tion of native gifts, in workmanship as in other respects. 
Hybrid stocks, indeed, have a wider range of usual varia¬ 
bility than the combined extreme limits of the racial 
types that enter into the composition of the hybrid. So 
that a great variety, even aberration and eccentricity, 
of native gifts is to be looked for in such cases, and this 
wide range of variation in workmanlike initiative should 
show itself in the technology of any such peoples. Yet 
there may still prevail a strikingly determinate difference 
between any two such hybrid populations, both in the 
characteristic features of their technology and in their 
routine workmanship; as is illustrated in the contrast 
between Japan and the Western nations. These racial 
differences in point of endowment may be slight in the 
first instance, but as they work cumulatively their ul¬ 
terior effect may still be very marked; and they may 
result in marked differences not only in respect of the 
character of the technological situation at a given point 
of time but also in the rate of advance and the direction 
taken by the technological advance. So in the case of 
the Far East, as contrasted with the Occidental peoples, 
the genius of the races engaged has prevailingly taken 
the direction of proficiency in handicraft, rather than 
that somewhat crude but efficient recourse to mechanical 
expedients which chiefly distinguishes the technology of 
the West. 

The stability of racial types makes it possible to study 
the innate characters of the existing population under less 
complex and confusing circumstances than those of the 
cultural situation in which this population is now found. 
By going back into the earlier phases of the Western 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 113 

culture the scrutiny of the living population of Europe 
and its colonies can, in effect, be pushed back in a frag¬ 
mentary way over an interval of some thousands of 
years. Such acquaintance as may in this way be gained 
with the spiritual makeup of the peoples of the Western 
culture at any point in its past history and prehistory 
should bear immediately and without serious abatement 
on the native character of the generation in whose hands 
the fortunes of that culture now rest; provided only that 
the inquiry assures itself of the racial continuity, racial 
identity, of these peoples through this period of time. 
This question of race identity is no longer a matter of 
serious debate so far as concerns the peoples of northern 
and western Europe, within the effective bounds of the 
Occidental civilisation and as far back as the beginning 
of the neolithic period. Assuredly there is debate and 
uncertainty as to local details of racial mixture in nearly 
all parts of this cultural area at some point in past time, 
but these uncertainties of detail are not of such a nature 
or such magnitude as to vitiate the data for an inquiry 
into the general characteristics of the races concerned. 
By and large, the mixture of races in north Europe has 
apparently not varied greatly since early neolithic times, 
and the changes that have taken place are known with 
some confidence, in the main. Much the same holds 
true for the Mediterranean seaboard, although the 
changes in that region appear to have been more con¬ 
siderable and are perhaps less readily traceable. For 
northern and western Europe taken together, in spite of 
considerable local fluctuations, the variations in the 
general racial composition of the peoples has, on the 
whole, not been extensive or extremely serious since the 


114 The Instinct of Workmanship 

latter part of the stone age. The three great racial stocks 1 
of Western civilisation have apparently shared their 
joint dominance in this culture among themselves since 
about the time when the use of bronze first came into 
Europe, which should be before the close of the stone 
age. And these three stocks are not greatly alien to 
one another; two of them, the Mediterranean and the 
blond, being apparently somewhat closely related in 
point of descent and therefore presumably in point of 
spiritual makeup. 

It is with less confidence that any student of these 
modern cultures can test his case by evidence drawn 
from existing or historical communities living on the 
savage or lower barbarian plane and not closely related, 
racially, to the peoples of Western Europe. The dis¬ 
crepancies in such a case are of two kinds: (a) The racial 
type, and therefore the spiritual (instinctive) make-up 
of these alien savages or barbarians, is not the same as 
that of the modern Europeans; hence the culture worked 
out under the control of their somewhat different en¬ 
dowment of instincts should come to a different result, 
particularly since any such racial discrepancy in the 
matter of instincts should be expected to work cumula¬ 
tively to a different cultural outcome. These alien com¬ 
munities of the lower cultures can therefore not be ac¬ 
cepted off-hand as representing an earlier phase of Occi¬ 
dental civilisation. This infirmity attaches to any re¬ 
course to an existing savage or barbarian community 


1 Cf. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe; G. Sergi, The Mediterranean 
Race; V. de Lapouge, VAryen; cf. also, J. Deniker, Les races europeennes, 
and “Les six races composant la population de l’Europe,” Journal An -* 
thropological Institute , vol 34. 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 115 

for object-lessons to illustrate the working of European 
human nature in similarly primitive circumstances, in 
the degree in which the community in question may be 
remote from the Europeans in point of racial type; which 
reduces itself to a difficult question as to the point in the 
family-tree of the races of man from which the two 
contrasted races have diverged, and of the number, 
character, and magnitude of the racial mutations that 
may have intervened between the presumed point of 
divergence and the existing racial types so contrasted. 
(b) It is commonly said, and it is presumably true 
enough, that all known communities on the lower levels 
of culture are far from a state of primitive savagery; that 
they are not to be taken as genuinely archaic, but are the 
result either of a comparatively late reversion, under 
special circumstances, from a past higher stage, or they 
are peoples which have undergone so protracted an ex¬ 
perience in savagery that their present state is one of 
extreme sophistification in all a the beastly devices of the 
heathen,” rather than substantially an early or archaic 
type of culture, such as would have marked a transient 
stage in the development of those peoples that have 
attained civilised life. 

No doubt there is some substance to these objections, 
but they contain rather a modicum of truth than an 
inclusive presentation of the facts relevant to the case. 
As to ( a ), the races of man are, after all, more alike than 
unlike, and the evidence drawn from the experience of 
any one racial stock or mixture is not to be disregarded 
as having no significance for the probable course of things 
experienced by any other racial stock during a corre¬ 
sponding interval in its life-history. Yet there is doubt- 


n6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

less a wide and debatable margin of error to be allowed 
for in the use of all evidence of this class. As to ( b ), by 
virtue of the stability of racial types the populations of 
existing communities of the lower cultures should be 
today what they were at the outset, in respect of the 
most substantial factor in their present situation, their 
spiritual (instinctive) make-up; and this unaltered com¬ 
plement of instincts should, under similar circumstances 
and with a moderate allowance of time, work out sub¬ 
stantially the same general run of cultural results whether 
the resulting phase of culture were reached by approach 
from a near and untroubled beginning or by regression 
from a “higher plane.” So that the existing communi¬ 
ties of savages or lower barbarians should present a pass¬ 
ably competent object lesson in archaic savagery and 
barbarism whether their past has been higher, lower, or 
simply more of the same. 

All this, of course, assumes the stability of racial 
types. But since, tacitly, that assumption is habitually 
made by ethnologists, all that calls for apology or ex¬ 
planation here is the avowal of it. The greater propor¬ 
tion of ethnological generalisations on this range of ques¬ 
tions would be quite impotent without that assumption 
as their major premise. What has not commonly been 
assumed or admitted, except by subconscious implica¬ 
tion, is the necessary corollary that these stable types 
with which ethnologists and anthropologists busy them¬ 
selves must have arisen by mutation from previously 
existing types, rather than by a long continued and di¬ 
vergent accumulation of insensible variations. A result 
of avowing such a view of the genesis of races will be 
that the various races cannot be regarded as being all of 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 117 

the same date and racial maturity, or of the same signifi¬ 
cance for any discussion bearing on the higher cultures. 
The races engaged in the Western culture will presum¬ 
ably be found to be of relatively late date, as having 
arisen out of relatively late mutational departures, as 
rated in terms of the aggregate life-history of mankind. 
Presumably also many of the other races will be found to 
be somewhat widely out of touch with the members of 
this Occidental aggregation of racial stocks; some more, 
others less remotely related to them, according as their 
mutational pedigree may be found to indicate. 

An advantage derivable from such an avcwal of the 
stability of types, as against its covert assumption and 
overt disavowal, is that it enables the stud nt to look 
for the beginning, in time and space, of any given racial 
stock with which his inquiry is concerned, and to handle 
it as a unit throughout its life-history. 

In all probability each of the leading racial stocks of 
Europe began its life-history on what would currently 
be accounted a low level of savagery. And yet this 
phase of savagery, whatever it may have been like, will 
have been removed from the first beginnings of human 
culture by a long series of thousands of years. That 
such was the case, for instance, with the European blond 
is scarcely to be questioned; 1 and it is at least highly 

iThe available evidence indicates that the dolicho-blond race of 
northern Europe probably originated in a mutation (from the Mediter¬ 
ranean as its parent stock?) during the early neolithic period, that is to 
say about at the beginning of the neolithic in western Europe. There is 
less secure ground for conjecture as to the date and circumstances under 
which any one of the other European races originated, but the date and 
place of their origin seems to lie outside of Europe and earlier than the 


118 The Instinct of Workmanship 

probable that the other stocks now associated with the 
blond, though probably older, must also have come into 
being relatively late in the life-history of the species. 

Vague as this dating may be, it signifies that the initial 
phase in the life-history of at least one, and presumably 
of all, of the leading races of Europe falls in a savage 
culture of a relatively advanced land as compared with 
the rudest human beginnings. Therefore when these 
stocks began life, and so were required to make good 
their survival, the selective conditions imposed on them, 
and to which they were required to conform on pain of 
extinction, were the conditions of a savage culture which 
had already made some appreciable advance in the arts 
of life. They had not to meet brute nature in the help¬ 
less nakedness of those remote ancestors in whom hu¬ 
manity first began. Mutationally speaking, the stock 
was born to the use of tools and to the facile mastery of a 
relatively advanced technology. And conversely it is a 
fair inference that these stocks that have peopled Europe 
would have been unfit to survive if they had come into 
the world before some appreciable advance in technology 
had been made. That is to say, these stocks could not 
by native gift have been fit for a wild life, in the unquali¬ 
fied sense of the term; nor have they ever lived a life of 
nature in any such sense. They came into the savage 
world after the race had lived through many thousand 
years of technological experience and (presumably) 
many successive mutational alterations of racial type, 

European neolithic period. Unfortunately there has been little direct or 
succinct discussion of this matter among anthropologists hitherto.— 
Cf. “The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race,” Journal oj Race 
Development , April, 1913. 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 119 

and they were fitted to the exigencies of the savage world 
into which they came rather than those of any earlier 
phase of savagery. The youngest of them, the latest 
mutant, emerged in early neolithic times, and since he 
eminently made good his fitness to survive under those 
conditions he presumably emerged with such an endow¬ 
ment of traits, physical and spiritual, as those conditions 
called for; and also presumably with no appreciable 
burden of aptitudes, propensities, instincts, capacities 
that would be disserviceable, or perhaps even that would 
be wholly unserviceable, in the circumstances in which 
he was placed. And since the other racial elements of 
the European population, at least the two main ones, 
do not differ at all radically from the blond in their native 
capacities, it is likewise to be presumed that they also 
emerged from a mutation under circumstances of culture, 
and especially of technology, not radically different in 
degree from those that first surrounded the blond. 

The difference between these three racial stocks is 
much more evident in their physical traits than in their 
instinctive gifts or their intellectual capacity; and yet 
the similarity of the three is so great and distinctive 
even on the physical side that anthropologists are in¬ 
clined to class the three together as all and several dis¬ 
tinctively typical of a “ white” or “caucasic” race, to 
which they are held collectively to belong. Something 
to the like effect seems to hold true for the distinctive 
groups of racial stocks that have made the characteristic 
civilisations of the Far East on the one hand and of 
southern Asia on the other hand; and something similar 
might, again, be said for the group of stocks that were 
concerned in the ancient civilisations of America. 


120 The Instinct of Workmanship 

It may be pertinent to add that, except for a long ante¬ 
cedent growth of technology, that is to say a long con¬ 
tinued cumulative experience in workmanship, with the 
resultant accumulated knowledge of the ways and means 
of life, none of the characteristic races of Europe could 
have survived. In the absence of these antecedent 
technological gains, together with the associated growth 
of institutions, such mutants, with their characteristic 
gifts and limitations, must have perished. 

On that level of savagery on which these European 
stocks began, and to which the several European racial 
types with their typical endowment of instincts are pre¬ 
sumably adapted, men appear to have lived a fairly 
peaceable, though by no means an indolent life; in rela¬ 
tively small groups or communities; without any of the 
more useful domestic animals, though probably with 
some domestic plants; and busied, with getting their 
living by daily work. Since they survived under the 
conditions offered them it is to be presumed that these 
men and women, say of the early neolithic time, took 
instinctively and kindly to those activities and mutual 
relations that would further the life of the group; and 
that, on the whole, they took less kindly and instinctively 
to such activities as would bring damage and discomfort 
on their neighbours and themselves. 1 Any racial type of 

1 The Melanesians may be contrasted with the Baltic peoples in this 
respect, though the comparison is perhaps rather suggestive than con¬ 
vincing. The Melanesians are apparently endowed with a very respect¬ 
able capacity for workmanship, as regards both insight and application, 
and with a relatively high sense of economic expediency. They are also 
possessed of an alert and enduring group solidarity. But they apparently 
lack that reasonable degree of “ humanity ” and congenital tolerance that 



The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 


121 


which this had not been true, under the conditions known 
then to have prevailed in their habitat, must have pres¬ 
ently disappeared from the face of the land, and the 
later advance of the Western culture would not have 
known their breed. Some other racial type, tempera¬ 
mentally so constituted as better to meet these require¬ 
ments of survival under neolithic conditions, would have 
taken their place and would have left their own offspring 
to populate the region. 1 

What is known of the conditions of life in early neo¬ 
lithic times 2 indicates that the first requisite of competi¬ 
tive survival was a more or less close attention to the 

has on the whole kept the peoples of the Baltic region from fatal extrava¬ 
gances of cruelty and sustained hatred between groups. Not that any 
excess of humanity has marked the course of culture in North Europe. 
But it seems at least admissible to say that mutual hatred, distrust and 
disparagement falls more readily into abeyance among these peoples 
than among the Melanesians; particularly when and in so far as the ma¬ 
terial interest of the several groups visibly suffers from a continued free 
run of extravagant animosity. The difference in point of native propen¬ 
sity may not be very marked, but such degree of it as there is has ap¬ 
parently thrown the balance in such a way that the Baltic peoples have, 
technologically, had the advantage of a wide and relatively easy contact 
and communication; whereas the Melanesians have during an equally 
protracted experience spent themselves largely on interstitial animosi¬ 
ties.—Cf. Codrington, The Melanesians; Seligmann, The Melanesians oj 
British New Guinea. 

1 These considerations apparently apply with peculiar force to the 
blond race, in that the evidence of early times goes to argue that this 
stock never lived in isolation from other, rival stocks. It began pre¬ 
sumably as a small minority in a community made up chiefly of a dif¬ 
ferent racial type, its parent stock, and in an environment at large in 
which at least one rival stock was present in force from near the outset; 
so that race competition, that is to say competition in terms of births and 
deaths, was instant and unremitting. And this competition the given 
conditions enforced in terms of group subsistence. 

2 Cf., e. g., Sophus Mtlller, Vor Oldtid , “Stenalderen.’? J 


122 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


business in hand, the providing of subsistence for the 
group and the rearing of offspring—a closer attention, 
for instance, than was given to this business by those 
other rival stocks whom the successful ones displaced; 
all of which throws into the foreground as indispensable 
native traits of the successful race the parental bent and 
the sense of workmanship, rather than those instinctive 
traits that make for disturbance of the peace. 1 

But through it all the suggestion insinuates itself that 
the latest, or youngest, of the three main European stocks, 
the blond, has more rather than less of the pugnacious 
and predatory temper than the other two, and that this 
stock made its way to the front in spite of, if not by force 
of these traits. The advantage of the blond as a fighter 
seems to have been due in part to an adventurous and 
pugnacious temper, but also in part to a superior phy¬ 
sique,—superior for the purpose of fighting hand to hand 
or with the implements chiefly used in warfare and 
piracy down to a date within the nineteenth century. 
The same physical traits of mass, stature and katabolism 
will likewise have been of great advantage in the quest 
of a livelihood under the conditions that prevailed in the 
North-sea region, the habitat of the dolicho-blond, in 
the stone age. Something to the same effect is true of 
the spiritual traits which are said to characterise the 
blond,—a certain canny temerity and unrest. 2 So that 

1 It has not commonly been noted, though it will scarcely be questioned, 
that fighting capacity and the propensity to fight have rarely, if ever, 
been successful in the struggle between races and peoples when brought 
into competition with a diligent growing of crops and children, if success 
be counted in terms of race survival. 

2 It is apparently an open question whether these spiritual traits are 
properly to be ascribed to the dolicho-blond as traits of that type taken 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 


123 


the point is left somewhat in doubt; the traits which 
presently made the northern blond the most formidable 
disturber of the peace of Europe and kept him so for 
many centuries may at the outset have been chiefly 
conducive to the survival of the type by their servicea¬ 
bility for industrial purposes under the peculiar cir¬ 
cumstances of climate and topography in which the race 
first came up and made good its survival. 

In modern speculations on the origins of culture and 
the early history of mankind it has until recently been 
usual to assume, uncritically, that human communities 
have from the outset of the race been entangled in an 
inextricable web of mutual hostilities and beset with an 
all-pervading sentiment of fear; that the “state of na¬ 
ture” was a state of blood and wounds, expressing itself 
in universal malevolence and suspicion. Latterly, stu¬ 
dents of primitive culture, and more especially those 
engaged at first hand in field work, who come in contact 
with peoples of the lower culture, have been coming to 
realise that the facts do not greatly support such a pre¬ 
sumption, and that a community which has to make its 
own living by the help of a rudimentary technological 
equipment can not afford to be habitually occupied with 
annoying its neighbours, particularly so long as its neigh¬ 
bours have not accumulated a store of portable wealth 
which will make raiding worth while. No doubt, many 
savage and barbarian peoples live in a state of conven- 

by itself, rather than traits characteristic of the hybrid offspring of the 
blond stock crossed on one or other of the racial stocks associated with 
it in the populations of Europe. The evidence at large seems rather to 
bear out the view that any hybrid population is likely to be endowed 
with an exceptional degree of that restlessness and discontent that go to 
make up what is spoken of as a “spirit of enterprise” in the race. 


124 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tional feud or habitual, even if intermittent, war and 
predation, without substantial inducement in the way of 
booty. But such communities commonly are either so 
placed that an easy livelihood affords them a material 
basis for following after these higher things out of mere 
fancy; 1 or they are peoples living precariously hand-to- 
mouth and fighting for their lives, in great part from a 
fancied impossibility of coming to terms with their alien 
and unnaturally cruel neighbours. 2 Communities of the 
latter class are often living in a state of squalor and dis¬ 
comfort, with a population far short of what their en¬ 
vironment would best support even with their inefficient 
industrial organisation and equipment, and their tech¬ 
nology is usually ill-suited to a settled life and unpromis¬ 
ing for any possible advance to a higher culture. There 
is no urgent reason for assuming that the races which 
have made their way to a greater technological efficiency, 
with settled life and a large population, must have come 
up from this particular phase of civilisation as their 
starting point, or that such a culture should have been 
favourable to the survival and increase of the leading 
racial stocks of Europe, since it does not appear to be 
especially favourable to the success of the communities 
known to be now living after that fashion. 3 

The preconception that early culture must have been 
warlike has not yet disappeared even among students 
of these phenomena, though it is losing their respect; but 
a derivative of it still has much currency, to the effect 

1 As, e. g., the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands at the time of 
their discovery. See, also, Codrington, The Melanesians. 

2 Not an unusual state of things among the Melanesians and Microne- 
sians, and in a degree among the Australians. 

3 See note, p. 120. 


The Savage Stale of the Industrial Arts 


125 


that all savage peoples, as also the peoples of the lower 
barbarism, live in a state of universal and unremitting 
fear, particularly fear of the unknown. This chronic 
fear is presumed to show itself chiefly in religion and other 
superstitious practices, where it is held to explain many 
things that are otherwise obscure. There is not a little 
evidence from extant savage communities looking in 
this direction, and more from the lower barbarian cul¬ 
tures that are characteristically warlike. 1 Wherever 
this animus is found its effect is to waste effort and divert 
it to religious and magical practices and so to hinder the 
free unfolding of workmanship by enjoining a cumber¬ 
some routine of ritual and by warning the technologist 
off forbidden ground. But it is doubtless a hasty general¬ 
isation to carry all this over uncritically and make it 
apply to all peoples of the lower culture, past and present. 
It is known not to be true of many existing communities, 2 
and the evidence of it in some ancient cultures is very 
dubious. Such a characterisation of the neolithic culture 
of Europe, whether north-European or ^Egean, finds 
no appreciable support in the archaeological evidence. 
These two regions are the most significant for the neo¬ 
lithic period in Europe, and the material from both is 
relatively very poor in weapons, as contrasted with 
tools, on the one hand, and there is at the same time little 
or nothing to indicate the prevalence of superstitious 
practices based on fear. Indeed, the material is surpris¬ 
ingly poor in elements of any kind that can safely be 
set down to the account of religion or magic, whether as 
inspired by fear or by more genial sentiments. It is one 

1 E. g., some Australian natives and some of the lower Malay cultures. 

2 E. g., the Pueblo and the Eskimo. 


226 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


of the puzzles that beset any student who insists on 
finding everywhere a certain normal course of cultural 
sequence, which should in the early times include, among 
other things, a fearsome religion, a wide fabric of magical 
practices, and an irrepressible craving for manslaughter. , 
And when, presently, something of a symbolism and 
apparatus of superstition comes into view, in 'the late 
neolithic and bronze ages, the common run of it is by no 
means suggestive of superstitious fear and religious 
atrocities. The most common and characteristic objects 
of this class are certain figurines and certain symbolical 
elements suggestive of fecundity, such as might be looked 
for in a peaceable, sedentary, agricultural culture on a 
small scale. 1 A culture virtually without weapons, whose 
gods are mothers and whose religious observances are a 
ritual of fecundity, can scarcely be a culture of dread 
and of derring-do. With the fighting barbarians, on the 
other hand, male deities commonly take the first rank, 
and their ritual symbolises the mastery of the god and the 
servitude of the worshipper. 

It is true, of course, that both of weapons and of cult 
objects far the greater number that were once in use 
will have disappeared, since most of the implements and 
utensils of stone-age cultures are, notoriously, made of 
wood or similar perishable materials. 2 So that the finds 

1 Indeed, such as very suggestively to recall the ritual objects and ob¬ 
servances of the Pueblo Indians. 

2 For an extreme case of this among living communities, see Skeat and 
Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula , vol. i, pp. 242-250, where 
the generalisation is set down (p. 248) that “the rudimentary stage of 
culture through which these tribes have passed, and in some cases are still 
passing, may perhaps be more accurately described as a wood and bone 
age than as an age of stone/’ in as much as the evidence goes to show that 




127 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 

>\*\ j 

give no complete series of the appliances in use in their 
time; whole series of objects that were of first-rate im¬ 
portance in that culture having probably disappeared 
without leaving a trace. But what is true in this respect 
of weapons and cult objects should be equally true of 
tools, or nearly so. So that the inference to be drawn 
from the available material would be that the early 
neolithic culture of north Europe, the Aegean, and other 
explored localities presumed to belong in the same racial 
and cultural complex, must have been of a prevailingly 
peaceable complexion. With the advance in technology 
and in the elaboration and abundance of objects that 
comes into sight progressively through the later neolithic 
period, down to its close, this disproportion between 
tools and weapons (and cult objects) grows more impres¬ 
sive and more surprising. Hitherto this disproportion 
has been more in evidence in the Scandinavian finds 
than in the other related fields of stone-age culture, 
unless an exception should be made in favour of the late 
neolithic sites explored at Anau. 1 But this archaeological 
outcome, setting off the Baltic stone age as peculiarly 
scant of weapons and peculiarly rich in tools, may be 
provisional only, and may be due to the more exhaustive 
exploration of the Scandinavian countries and the un¬ 
commonly abundant material from that region. In the 
later (mainly Scandinavian) neolithic material, where 

before they began to get metals from the Malays their only implements of 
a more durable material were “the anvil and hammer (unwrought) . . 
the whetstone, chips or flakes used as knives, and cooking stones.” 
From the different character of their environment this recourse to wood 
and bone could scarcely have been carried to such an extreme by the 
savages of the Baltic region. 

i Cf. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan , 


128 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


the weapons are to be counted by dozens the tools are 
to be counted by hundreds, according to a scheme of 
classification in which everything that can be construed 
as a weapon is so classed, and there are many more 
hundreds of the one class than there are dozens of the 
other. 1 As near as can be made out, cult objects are 
similarly infrequent among these materials even after 
some appreciable work in pottery comes in evidence. 

What has just been said is after all of a negative charac¬ 
ter. It says that nothing like a warlike, predatory, or 
fearsome origin can be proven from the archaeological 
material for the neolithic culture of those racial stocks 
that have counted for most in the early periods of Europe. 
The presumption raised by this evidence, however, is 
fairly strong. And considerations of the material cir¬ 
cumstances in which this early culture was placed, as 
well as of the spiritual traits characteristically required 
by these circumstances and shown by the races in ques¬ 
tion, point to a similar conclusion. The proclivity to 
unreasoning fear that is visible in the superstitious prac¬ 
tices of so many savage communities and counts for so 
much in the routine of their daily life, 2 is to all appear¬ 
ance not so considerable an element in the make-up of 
the chief European stocks. Perhaps it enters in a less 
degree in the spiritual nature of the European blond 

1 A casual visit to the Scandinavian museums will scarcely convey 
this impression. To meet the prepossessions of the public, and perhaps 
of the experts, the weapons are made much of in the showcases, as is 
to be expected; but they are relatively scarce in the store-rooms, where 
the tools on the other hand are rather to be estimated by the cubic yard 
than counted by the piece. 

2 Seen, e. g., in the observance and sanction of tabu in many of the 
lower cultures. 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 129 

than in that of any other race; that race—or its hybrid 
offspring—has at any rate proved less amenable to reli¬ 
gious control than any other, and has also shown less 
hesitation in the face of unknown contingencies. And 
the circumstances of the presumed initial phase of the 
life-history of this race would appear not to have favoured 
a spiritual (instinctive), type largely biassed by an alert 
and powerful sentiment of unreasoning fear. So also 
an aggressive humanitarian sentiment is as well at home 
in the habits of thought of the north-European peoples 
as in any other, such as sorts ill with a native predatory 
animus. If it be assumed, as seems probable, that the 
situation which selectively tested the fitness of this 
stock to survive was that of the early post-glacial time, 
when its habitat in Europe was slowly being cleared of 
the ice-sheet, it would appear antecedently probable 
that the new (mutant) type,which made good its survival 
in following up the retreating fringe of the ice-sheet and 
populating the land so made available, will not have been 
a people peculiarly given to fear or to predation. A 
great facility of this kind, with its concomitants of cau¬ 
tion, conservatism, suspicion and cruelty, would not 
be serviceable for a race so placed. 1 

Even if it were a possible undertaking it would not be 
much to the present purpose to trace out in detail the 

1 The Eskimo are placed in circumstances that are in some respects 
similar to those presumed to have conditioned the life of the blond race 
and its hybrids during the early phases of its life-history, and among 
the traits that have made for the survival of the Eskimo is undoubtedly 
to be counted the somewhat genial good-fellowship of that race, coupled 
as it is with a notable disinclination to hostilities. So also the Indians of 
the North-West Coast, whose situation perhaps parallels that of the 


13 ° 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


many slow and fumbling moves by which any given race 
or people, in Europe or elsewhere, have worked out the 
technological particulars that have led from the begin¬ 
nings down through the primitive and later growth of 
culture. Such a work belongs to the ethnologists and 
archaeologists; and it is summed up in the proposition 
that men have applied common sense, more or less 
hesitatingly and with more or less refractory limitations, 
to the facts with •which they have had to deal; that they 
have accumulated a knowledge of technological expedi¬ 
ents and processes from generation to generation, ahvays 
going on what had already been achieved in ways and 
means, and gradually discarding or losing such elements 
of the growing technological scheme as seemed no longer 
to be worth while, 1 and carrying along a good many 

neolithic Baltic culture more closely even than the Eskimo, are not among 
the notably warlike peoples of the earth, although they undoubtedly 
show more of a predatory animus than their northern neighbours. In this 
case it is probably safe to say that their technological achievements have 
in no degree been furthered by such warlike enterprise as they have 
shown, and that their comfort and success as a race would have been 
even more marked if they had been gifted with less of the warlike spirit 
and had kept the peace more consistently throughout their habitat 
than they have done.—Cf. Franz Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” Bureau 
of American Ethnology , Report, 1884-1885; The same, “The Secret So¬ 
cieties and Social Organisation of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Report, Na¬ 
tional Museum, 1895; A. P. Niblack, “Coast Indians of Southern Alaska 
and Northern British Columbia,” ibid, 1888. 

1 Such loss by neglect of technological elements that have been super¬ 
seded may have serious consequences in case a people of somewhat ad¬ 
vanced attainments suffers a material set-back either in its industrial 
circumstances or in its cultural situation more at large,—as happened, 
e. g., in the Dark Ages of Europe. In such case it is likely to result that 
the community will be unable to fall back on a state of the industrial 
arts suited to the reduced circumstances into which it finds itself thrown, 
having lost the use of many of the technological elements familiar to 


The Savage Slate of the Industrial Arts 


131 

elements that were of no material effect but were im¬ 
posed by the logic of the scheme or of its underlying 
principles (habits of thought). 

Of the early technological development in Europe, so 
far as it is genetically connected with the later Western 
civilisation, the culture of the Baltic region affords as 
good and illustrative an object lesson as may be had; its 
course is relatively well known, simple and unbroken. 
Palaeolithic times do not count in this development, as 
the neolithic culture begins with a new break in Europe. 

It is known, then, that by early neolithic times on the 
narrow Scandinavian waters men had learned to make 
and use certain rude stone and bone implements found 
in the kitchen-middens (refuse heaps, shell-mounds of 
Denmark), that they had ways and appliances (the 
nature of which is not known) for collecting certain shell¬ 
fish and for catching such game and fish as their habitat 
afforded, and that they presently, if not from the outset, 
had acquired the use of certain crop plants and had 
learned to make pottery of a crude kind. From this as 
a point of departure in the period of the kitchen-middens 
the stone implements were presently improved and mul¬ 
tiplied, the methods of working the material (flint) and 
of using the products of the flint industry were gradually 
improved and extended, until in the long course of time 

earlier generations that lived under similar circumstances, and so the 
industrial community finds itself in many respects driven to make a 
virtually new beginning, from a more rudimentary starting point than the 
situation might otherwise call for. This in turn acts to throw the people 
back to a more archaic phase of technology and of institutions than the 
initial cultural loss sustained by the community would of itself appear 
to warrant. 


132 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


the utmost that has anywhere been achieved in that 
class of industry was reached. Domestic animals began 
to be added to the equipment relatively early , 1 though 
at a long interval from the neolithic beginnings as counted 
in absolute time. Improvement and extension in all 
lines of stone-working and wood-working industry went 
forward: except that stone-dressing and masonry are 
typically absent, owing, no doubt, to the extensive use 
of woodwork instead . 2 Along with this advance in the 
mechanic arts goes a growing density of population and 
a wide extension of tillage; until, at the coming of bronze, 
the evidence shows that these communities were popu¬ 
lous, prosperous, and highly skilled in those industrial 
arts that lay within their technological range. 

Apart from the pottery, which may have some merit 
as an art product, there is very little left to show what 
may have been their proficiency in the decorative arts, 
or what was their social organisation or their religious 
life. The evidences of warlike enterprise and religious 
practices are surprisingly scanty, being chiefly the doubt¬ 
ful evidence of many and somewhat elaborate tombs. 
From the tombs (mounds and barrows) and their dis¬ 
tribution something may be inferred as to the social 
organisation; and the evidence on this head seems to 
indicate a widespread agricultural population, living 
(probably) in small communities, without much cen¬ 
tralised or authoritative control, but with some appre- 

1 Sophus Muller, Vor Oldtid, “ Stenalderen,” sec. iii, “Tidsforhold i den 
asldre Stenalder;” O. Montelius, Les temps prehistoriques en Suede , ch. i, 
p. 20. 

2 Compare the case of the Indians of the North-West Coast, who have 
occupied a region comparable to the neolithic Baltic area in the distribu¬ 
tion of land and water as well as in the abundance of good timber. 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 133 

ciable class differences in the distribution of wealth in 
the later phases of the period. 

With interruptions, more or less serious, from time 
to time, and with increasing evidence of a penchant for 
warlike or predatory enterprise on the one hand and of 
class distinctions on the other hand, much the same story 
runs on through the ages of bronze and early iron. Evi¬ 
dences of borrowing from outside, mainly the borrowing 
of decorative technique and technological elements, are 
scattered through the course of this development from 
very early times, showing that there was always some 
intercourse, perhaps constant intercourse, with other 
peoples more or less distant. So that in time, by the 
beginning of the bronze age, there is evidence of settled 
trade relations with peoples as remote as the Mediter¬ 
ranean seaboard. 

In many of its details this prehistoric culture shows 
something of the same facility in the use of mechanical 
expedients as has come so notably forward again in the 
late development of the industrial arts of western Europe. 
It is in its mechanical efficiency that the technology of 
the latterday Western culture stands out preeminent, 
and it is similarly its easy command of the mechanical 
factors with which it deals that chiefly distinguishes the 
prehistoric technology of North Europe. In other re¬ 
spects the prehistoric material from this region does not 
argue a high level of civilisation. There are no ornate 
or stupendous structures; what there is of the kind is 
mounds and barrows of moderately great size and using 
only undressed stone where any is used, but making a 
mechanically effective use of this. There is, indeed, 
nothing from the stone age in the way of edifices, fabrics 


134 77 /e Instinct of Workmanship 

or decorative work that is to be classed, in point of ex¬ 
cellence in design or execution, with the polished-flint 
woodworking axe or chisel of that time. From the 
bronze age at its best there is much excellent bronze 
work of great merit both in workmanship and in decora¬ 
tive effect; but the artistic merit of this work (from the 
middle and early half of the bronze age) lies almost 
wholly in its workmanlike execution and in the freedom 
and adequacy with which very simple mechanical ele¬ 
ments of decoration are employed. It is an art which 
appeals to the sense of beauty chiefly through the sense 
of workmanship, shown both in the choice of materials 
and decorative elements and in the use made of them. 
When this art aspires to more ambitious decorative 
effects or to representation of life forms, or indeed to 
any representation that has not been conventionalised 
almost past recognition, as it does in the later periods of 
of the bronze age, the result is that it can be commended 
for its workmanship alone, and so far as regards artistic 
effect it is mainly misspent workmanship. 1 

The same workmanlike insight and facility comes in 
evidence in the matter of borrowing, already spoken of. 
Borrowing goes on throughout this prehistoric culture, 
and the borrowed elements are assimilated with such 
despatch and effect as to make them seem home-bred 
almost from the start. It is a borrowing of technological 
elements, which are rarely employed except in full and 
competent adaptation to the uses to which they are 
turned; so much so that the archaeologists find it excep¬ 
tionally difficult to trace the borrowed elements to specific 

1 Sophus Muller, Vor Oldtid , “Bronzealderen,” secs, xiii, xiv; Monte- 
iius, Les temps prehistoriques en Suede , ch. ii. 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 135 

» > i • > \ , > 

sources, in spite of the great volume and frequency of 
this borrowing. 

There is a further and obscurer aspect to this facile 
borrowing. In the cultures where the technological and 
decorative elements are first invented, or acquired at 
first-hand by slow habituation, there will in the nature 
of the case come in with them into the scheme of tech¬ 
nology or of art more or less, but presumably a good 
deal, of extraneous or extrinsic by-products of their 
acquirement, in the way of magical or symbolic efficacy 
imputed and adhering to them in the habits of thought 
of their makers and users. Something of this kind has 
already been set out in some detail as regards the domes¬ 
tication and early use of the crop plants and animals; 
and the like is currently held to be true, perhaps in a 
higher degree, for the beginnings of art, both representa¬ 
tive and decorative, by the latterday students of that 
subject; the beginnings of art being held to have been 
magical and symbolic in the main, so far as regards the 
prime motives to its inception and its initial principles. 1 

In the origination and indigenous working-out of any 
' given technological factor, e. g., such as the use of the 
crop plants or the domestic animals, elements of imputed 
anthropomorphism are likely to be comprised in the 
habitual apprehension of the nature of these factors, 
and so find lodgment in the technological routine that 
has to do with them; the result being, chiefly, a limitation 
on their uses and on the ways and means by which they 
are utilised, together with a margin of lost motion in the 
way of magical and religious observances presumed to 

1 Cf., e. g., C. A. Haddon, Evolution in Art , section on “Magic and 
Religion.” • 


136 The Instinct of Workmanship 

V 

■ N 

be intrinsic to the due working of such factors. The 
ritual connected with tillage and cattle-breeding shows 
this magical side of a home-bred technology perhaps 
as felicitously, as anything; but similar phenomena are 
by no means infrequent in the mechanic arts, and in 
the fine arts these principles of symbolism and the like 
are commonly present in such force as to afford ground 
for distinguishing one school or epoch of art from another. 

Now, when any given technological or decorative 
element crosses the frontier between one culture and 
another, in the course of borrowing, it is likely to hap¬ 
pen that it will come into the new culture stripped of 
most or all of its anthropomorphic or spiritual virtues 
and limitations, more particularly, of course, if the cul¬ 
tural frontier in question is at the same time a linguistic 
frontier; since the borrowing is likely to be made from 
motives of workmanlike expediency, and the putative 
spiritual attributes of the facts involved are not obvious 
to men who have not been trained to impute them. The 
chief exception to such a rule would be any borrowing 
that takes effect on religious grounds, in which case, of 
course, the magical or symbolic efficacy of the borrowed 
elements are the substance that is sought in the borrow¬ 
ing. Herein, presumably, lies much of the distinctive 
character of the north-European prehistoric culture, 
which was in an eminent degree built up out of borrowed 
elements, so far as concerns both its technology and its 
art. And to this free and voluminous borrowing may 
likewise be due the apparent poverty of this early cul¬ 
ture in religious or magical elements. 

A further effect follows. The borrowing being (rela¬ 
tively) unencumbered with ritual restrictions and mag- 


The Savage State of the Industrial Arts 137 

ical exactions attached to their employment, they would 
fall into the scheme of things as mere matter-of-fact, to 
be handled with the same freedom and unhindered sa¬ 
gacity with which a workman makes use of his own 
hands, and could, without reservation, be turned to any 
use for which they were mechanically suited. Some¬ 
thing of symbolism and superstition might, of course, 
be carried over in the borrowing, and something more 
would unavoidably be bred into the borrowed elements 
in the course of their use; but the free start would always 
count for something in the outcome, both as regards the 
rate of progress made in the exploitation of the expedients 
acquired by borrowing and in the character of the tech¬ 
nological system at large into which they had been in¬ 
troduced. Both the relative freedom from magical re¬ 
straint and the growth of home-made anthropomorphic 
imputations may easily be detected in the course of 
this northern culture and in its outcome in modern times. 
Cattle, for instance, are a borrowed technological fact 
in the Baltic and North-Sea region, but superstitious 
practices seem never to have attached to cattle-breeding 
in that region in such volume and rigorous exaction as 
may be found nearer the original home of the domesti¬ 
cated species; and yet the volume of folk-lore, mostly of 
a genial and relatively unobstructive character, that has 
in later times grown up about the care of cattle in the 
Scandinavian countries is by no means inconsiderable. 


CHAPTER IV 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 

The scheme of technological insight and proficiency 
current in any given culture is manifestly a product of 
group life and is held as a common stock, and as mani¬ 
festly the individual workman is helpless without access 
to it. It is none too broad to say that he is a workman 
only because and so far as he effectually shares in this 
common stock of technological equipment. He may 
be gifted in a special degree with workmanlike aptitudes, 
may by nature be stout or dextrous or keen-sighted or 
quick-witted or sagacious or industrious beyond his 
fellows; but with all these gifts, so long as he has 
assimilated none of this common stock of workmanlike 
knowledge he remains simply an admirable parcel of 
human raw material; he is of no effect in industry. With 
such special gifts or with special training based on this 
common stock an individual may stand out among his 
fellows as a workman of exceptional merit and value, 
and without the common run of workmanlike aptitudes 
he may come to nothing worth while as a workman even 
with the largest opportunities and most sedulous training. 
It is the two together that make the working force of 
the community; and in both respects, both in his in¬ 
herited and in his acquired traits, the individual is a 
product of group life. 

Using the term in a sufficiently free sense, pedigree is 
v 138 


I 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 139 

no less and no more requisite to the workman’s effectual 
equipment than the common stock of technological mas¬ 
tery which the community offers him. But his pedigree 
is a group pedigree, just as his technology is a group 
technology. As is sometimes said to the same effect, 
the individual is a creature of heredity and circumstances. 
And heredity is always group heredity, 1 perhaps pecu¬ 
liarly so in the human species. 

The promptings of invidious self-respect commonly 
lead men to evade or deny something of the breadth of 
their inheritance in respect of human nature. “I am 
not as the publican yonder,” whether I have the grace 
to thank God for this invidious distinction or more 
simply charge it to the account of my reputable ancestors 
in the male line. With a change of venue by which the 
cause is taken out of the jurisdiction of interested parties, 
its complexion changes. So evident is the fact of group 
heredity in the lower animals, for instance, that biologists 
have no inclination to deny its pervading force, apart 
from any conceivably parthenogenetic lines of descent,— 
and, to the inconvenience of the eugenic pharisee, parthe¬ 
nogenetic descent never runs in the male line, besides 
being of extremely rare occurrence in the human species. 
As a matter of course the Darwinian biologists have 
the habit of appealing to group heredity as the main 
factor in the stability of species, and they are very 
curious about the special circumstances of any given 
case in which it may appear not to be fully operative: 
and they have, on the other hand, even looked hopefully 
to fortuitous isolation of particular lines of descent as 
a possible factor in the differentiation and fixation of 
1 Except for species that habitually breed by parthenogenesis. 


140 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


specific types, being at a loss to account for such differ¬ 
entiation or fixation so long as no insuperable mechanical 
obstacle stands in the way of persistent crossing. The 
like force of group heredity is visible in the characteristic 
differences of race. The heredity of any given race of 
mankind is always sufficiently homogeneous to allow 
all its individuals to be classed under the race. And 
when an individual comes to light in a fairly pure-bred 
community who shows physical traits that vary ob¬ 
viously from the common racial type of the community, 
the question which suggests itself to the anthropologists 
is not, How does this individual differ from others of the 
same breed? but, What is the alien strain, and how has 
it come in? And what is true of the physical characters 
of the race in this respect is only less obviously true of 
its spiritual traits. 

In a culture where all individuals are hybrids, in point 
of pedigree, as is the case with all the leading peoples of 
Christendom, the ways of this group heredity are par¬ 
ticularly devious, and the fortunes of the individual in 
this respect are in a peculiar degree exposed to the caprice 
of Mendelian contingencies; so that his make-up, physical 
and spiritual, is, humanly speaking, in the main a chapter 
of accidents. Where each individual draws for his 
hereditary traits on a wide ancestry of unstable hybrids, 
as all civilised men do, his chances are always those of 
the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability 
of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated 
ancestry. But he has also and everywhere in this hybrid 
panmixis an excellent chance of being allotted something 
more accentuated, for good or ill, in the way of hereditary 
traits than anything shown by his varied assortment of 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 141 

ancestors. It commonly happens in such a hybrid com¬ 
munity that in the new crossing of hybrids that takes 
place at every marriage, some new idiosyncracy, slight 
or considerable, comes to light in the offspring, beyond 
anything visible in the parents or the remoter pedigree; 
for in the crossing of what may be called multiple-hybrid 
parents, complementary characters that may have been 
dormant or recessive in the parents will come in from 
both sides, combine, re-enforce one another, and cumula¬ 
tively give an unlooked-for result. So that in a hybrid 
community the fortunes of all individuals are somewhat 
precarious in respect of heredity. 

Such are the conditions which have prevailed among 
the peoples of Europe since the first beginnings of that 
culture that has led up to the Western civilisation as 
known to history. In these circumstances any indi¬ 
vidual, therefore, owes to the group not only his share 
of that certain typical complement of traits that charac¬ 
terise the common run, but usually something more 
than is coming to him in the way of individual qualities 
and infirmities if he is in any way distinguishable from 
the common run, as well as a blind chance of transmitting 
almost any traits that he is not possessed of. 1 

In the lower cultures, where the division of labour is 
slight and the diversity of occupations is mainly such 
as marks the changes of the seasons, the common stock 
of technological knowledge and proficiency is not so 
extensive or so recondite but that the common man may 

1 The caution is perhaps unnecessary that it is not hereby intended to 
suggest a doubt of Mr. Galton’s researches or to question the proposals of 
the Eugenicals, whose labours are no doubt to be taken for all they are 
worth. 


142 The Instinct of Workmanship 

j 

compass it in some fashion, and in its essentials it is ac¬ 
cessible to all members of the community by common 
notoriety, and the training required by the state of the 
industrial arts comes to everyone as a matter of course 
in the routine of daily life. The necessary material 
equipment of tools and appliances is slight and the 
acquisition of it is a simple matter that also arranges 
itself as an incident in the routine of daily life. Given 
the common run of aptitude for the industrial pursuits 
incumbent on the members of such a community, the 
material equipment needful to find a livelihood or to put 
forth the ordinary productive effort and turn out the 
ordinary industrial output can be compassed without 
strain by any individual in the course of his work as he 
goes along. The material equipment, the tools, imple¬ 
ments, contrivances necessary and conducive to produc¬ 
tive industry, is incidental to the day’s work; in much the 
same way but in a more unqualified degree than the like 
is true as to the technological knowledge and skill re¬ 
quired to make use of this equipment. 1 

As determined by the state of the industrial arts in 
such a culture, the members of the community co-operate 
in much of their work, to the common gain and to no 
one’s detriment, since there is substantially no individual, 
or private, gain to be sought. There is substantially 
no bartering or hiring, though there is a recognised obli¬ 
gation in all members to lend a hand; and there is of 
course no price, as there is no property and no ownership, 
for the sufficient reason that the habits of life under these 

1 See, e. g., Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula , 
vol. ii, part ii; Report, Bureau of American Ethnology , 1884-1885, 
F. Boas, “The Central Eskimo.” 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 143 

circumstances do not provoke such a habit of thought. 
Doubtless, it is a matter of course that articles of use 
and adornment pertain to their makers or users in an 
intimate and personal way; which will come to be con¬ 
strued into ownership when in the experience of the com¬ 
munity an occasion for such a concept as ownership arises 
and persists in sufficient force to shape the current habits 
of thought to that effect. There is also more or less of 
reciprocal service and assistance, with a sufficient sense 
of mutuality to establish a customary scheme of claims 
and obligations in that respect. So also it is true that 
such a community holds certain lands and customary 
usufructs and that any trespass on these customary hold¬ 
ings is resented. But it would be a vicious misapprehen¬ 
sion to read ideas and rights of ownership into these 
practices, although where civilised men have come to 
deal with instances of the kind they have commonly been 
unable to put any other construction on the customs 
governing the case; for the reason that civilised men’s 
relations with these peoples of the lower culture have 
been of a pecuniary kind and for a pecuniary purpose, 
and they have brought no other than pecuniary concep¬ 
tions from home. 1 There being little in hand worth 
owning and little purpose to be served by its ownership, 
the habits of thought which go to make the institution 
of ownership and property rights have not taken shape. 
The slight facts which would lend themselves to owner¬ 
ship are not of sufficient magnitude or urgency to call 
the institution into effect and are better handled under 
customs which do not yet take cognisance of property 

1 Cf. Basil Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister , and The 
Figians. 


144 The Instinct of Workmanship 

rights. Naturally, in such a cultural situation there is 
no appreciable accumulation of wealth and no induce¬ 
ment to it; the nearest approach being an accumulation 
of trinkets and personal belongings, among which should, 
at least in some cases, be included certain weapons and 
perhaps tools. 1 These things belong to their owner or 
bearer in much the same sense as his name, which was 
not held on tenure of ownership or as a pecuniary asset 
before the use of trade-marks and merchantable good¬ 
will. 

The workman—more typically perhaps the work¬ 
woman—in such a culture, as indeed in any other, is a 
“productive agent” in the manner and degree deter¬ 
mined by the state of the industrial arts. What is ob¬ 
vious in this respect here holds only less visibly for any 
other, more complicated and technologically full-charged 
cultural situation, such as has come on with the growth 
of population and wealth among the more advanced 
peoples. He or she, or rather they—for there is sub¬ 
stantially no industry carried on in strict severalty in 
these communities—are productive factors or industrial 
agents, in the sense that they will on occasion turn out a 
surplus above their necessary current consumption, only 
because and so far as the state of the industrial arts en¬ 
ables them to do so. As workman, labourer, producer, 
breadwinner, the individual is a creature of the techno¬ 
logical scheme; which in turn is a creation of the group 
life of the community. Apart from the common stock 

1 The extent of this “quasi-personal fringe” of objects of intimate use 
varies considerably from one culture to another. It may often be in¬ 
ferred from the range of articles buried or destroyed with the dead among 
peoples on this level of culture. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 145 

of knowledge and training the individual members of 
the community have no industrial effect. Indeed, except 
by grace of this common technological equipment no 
individual and no family group in any of the known com¬ 
munities of mankind could support their own life; for 
in the long course of mankind’s life-history, since the 
human plane was first reached, the early mutants which 
were fit to survive in a ferine state without tools and with¬ 
out technology have selectively disappeared, as being 
unfit to survive under the conditions of domesticity 
imposed by so highly developed a state of the industrial 
arts as any of the savage cultures now extant. 1 The 
Homo Javensis and his like are gone, because there is 
technologically no place for them between the anthro¬ 
poids to the one side and the extant types of man on the 
other. And never since the brave days when Homo 
Javensis took up the “ white man’s burden” for the better 
regulation of his anthropoid neighbours has the techno¬ 
logical scheme admitted of any individual’s carrying on 
his life in severalty. So that industrial efficiency, whether 
of an individual workman or of the community at large, 
is a function of the state of the industrial arts. 2 

1 A doubt may suggest itself in this connection touching such cultures 
and peoples as the pagan races of the Malay peninsula, the Mincopies of 
the Andaman Islands, or (possibly) the Negritos of Luzon, but these con¬ 
ceivable exceptions to the rule evidently do not lessen its force. 

2 It may be pertinent to take note of the bearing of these considerations 
on certain dogmatic concepts that have played a part in the theoretical 
and controversial speculations of the last century. Much importance has 
been given by economists of one school and another to the “productivity 
of labour,” particularly as affording a basis for a just and equitable dis¬ 
tribution of the product; one school of controversialists having gone so 
far against the current of received economic doctrine as to allege that 
labour is the sole productive factor in industry and that the Labourer is oa 


146 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


The simple and obvious industrial system of this 
archaic plan leaves the individuals, or rather the domestic 
groups, that make up the community, economically 
independent of one another and of the community at 
large, except that they depend on the common techno¬ 
logical stock for the immaterial equipment by means of 
which to get their living. This is of course not felt by 
them as a relation of dependence; though there seems 
commonly to be some sense of indebtedness on part of 
the young, and of responsibility on part of the older 
generation, for the proper transmission of the recognised 
elements of technological proficiency. It is impossible 
to say just at what point in the growth and complication 
of technology this simple industrial scheme will begin to 
give way to new exigencies and give occasion to a new 
scheme of institutions governing the economic relations 
of men; such that the men’s powers and functions in the 
industrial community come to be decided on other 
grounds than workmanlike aptitude and special training. 
In the nature of things there can be no hard and fast 
limit to this phase of industrial organisation. Its dis- 

this ground entitled,in equity, to “the full product of hislabour.” It is of 
course not conceived that the considerations here set forth will dispose 
of these doctrinal contentions; but they make it at least appear that the 
productivity of labour, or of any other conceivable factor in industry, is 
an imputed productivity—imputed on grounds of convention afforded 
by institutions that have grown up in the course of technological develop¬ 
ment and that have consequently only such validity as attaches to habits 
of thought induced by any given phase of collective life. These habits of 
thought (institutions and principles) are themselves the indirect product 
of the technological scheme. The controversy as to the productivity of 
labour should accordingly shiftits ground from “the nature of things” to 
the exigencies of ingrained preconceptions, principles and expediencies as 
seen in the light of current technological requirements and the current 
drift of habituation. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 147 

appearance or supersession in any culture appears always 
to have been brought on by the growth of property, but 
the institution of property need by no means come in 
abruptly at any determinate juncture in the sequence of 
technological development. So that this archaic phase 
of culture in which industry is organised on the ground 
of workmanship alone may come very extensively to 
overlap and blend with the succeeding phase in which 
property relations chiefly decide the details of the indus¬ 
trial organisation,—as is shown in varying detail by the 
known lower cultures. 

The forces which may bring about such a transition 
are often complex and recondite, and they are seldom 
just the same in any given two instances. Neither the 
material situation nor the human raw material involved 
are precisely the same in all or several instances, and 
there is no coercively normal course of things that will 
constrain the growth of institutions to take a particular 
typical form or to follow a particular typical sequence in 
all cases. Yet, in a general way such a supersession of 
free workmanship by a pecuniary control of industry 
appears to have been necessarily involved in any con¬ 
siderable growth of culture. Indeed, at least in the 
economic respect, it appears to have been the most uni¬ 
versal and most radical mutation which human culture 
has undergone in its advance from savagery to civilisa¬ 
tion; and the causes of it should be of a similarly universal 
and intrinsic character. 

It may be taken as a generalisation grounded in the 
instinctive endowment of mankind that the human sense 
of workmanship will unavoidably go on turning to ac¬ 
count what there is in hand of technological knowledge, 


148 The Instinct of Workmanship 

f ■ 

and so will in the course of time, by insensible gains 
perhaps, gradually change the technological scheme, 
and therefore also the scheme of customary canons of 
conduct answering to it; and in the absence of over¬ 
mastering circumstances this sequence of change must, 
in a general way, set in the direction of greater techno¬ 
logical mastery. Something in the way of an “ advance ” 
in workmanlike mastery is to be looked for, in the absence 
of inexorable limitations of environment. The limita¬ 
tions may be set by the material circumstances or by 
circumstances of the institutional situation, but on the 
lower levels of culture the insurmountable obstacles to 
such an advance appear to have been those imposed by 
the material circumstances; although institutional fac¬ 
tors have doubtless greatly retarded the advance in most 
cases, and may well have defeated it in many. I11 some 
of the known lower cultures such an impassable con¬ 
juncture in the affairs of technology has apparently 
been reached now and again, resulting in a “stationary 
state” of the industrial arts and of social arrangements, 
economic and otherwise. Such an instance of “arrested 
development” is afforded by the Eskimo, who have to 
all appearance reached the bounds of technological mas¬ 
tery possible in the material circumstances in which they 
have been placed and with the technological antecedents 
which they have had to go on. At the other extreme of 
the American continent the Fuegians and Patagonians 
may similarly have reached at least a provisional limit 
of the same nature; though such a statement is less secure 
in their case, owing to the scant and fragmentary charac¬ 
ter of the available evidence. So also the Bushmen, the 
Ainu, various representative communities of the Negrito 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 149 

and perhaps of the Dravidian stocks, appear to have 
reached a provisional limit—barring intervention from 
without. In these latter instances the decisive obstacles, 
if they are to be accepted as such, seem to lie in the 
human-nature of the case rather than in the material 
circumstances. In these latter instances the sense of 
workmanship, though visibly alert and active, appears 
to have been inadequate to carry out the technological 
scheme into further new ramifications for want of the 
requisite intellectual aptitudes,—a failure of aptitudes 
not in degree but in kind. 

The manner in which increasing technological mastery 
has led over from the savage plan of free workmanship 
to the barbarian system of industry under pecuniary con¬ 
trol is perhaps a hazardous topic of speculation; but the 
known facts of primitive culture appear to admit at 
least a few general propositions of a broad and provi¬ 
sional character. It seems reasonably safe to say that 
the archaic savage plan of free workmanship will com¬ 
monly have persisted through the palaeolithic period of 
technology, and indeed somewhat beyond the transition 
to the neolithic. This is fairly borne out by the contem¬ 
porary evidence from savage cultures. In the prehistory 
of the north-European culture there is also reason to 
assume that the beginnings of a pecuniary control fall 
in the early half of the neolithic period. 1 There seems 
to be no sharply definable point in the technological 
advance that can be said of itself to bring on this revolu¬ 
tionary change in the institutions governing economic 
life. It appears to be loosely correlated with techno- 

1 See Sophus Muller, Vor Oldlid, “ Stenalderen,” and Aarbdger for nor- 
disk Oldkyndighed , 1906. 


150 The Instinct of Workmanship 

1 

•* . * 

logical improvement, so that it sets in when a sufficient 
ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial 
arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can ap¬ 
parently not be stated in terms of the industrial arts 
alone. Among the early consequences of an advance in 
technology beyond the state of the industrial arts sche ¬ 
matically indicated above, and coinciding roughly with 
the palaeolithic stage, is on the one hand an appreciable 
resort to “indirect methods of production’’,involving a 
systematic cultivation of the soil, domestication of 
plants and animals; or an appreciable equipment of 
industrial appliances, such as will in either case require a 
deliberate expenditure of labour and will give the holders 
of the equipment something more than a momentary 
advantage in the quest of a livelihood. On the other 
hand it leads also to an accumulation of wealth beyond 
the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that 
slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to 
anyone but their savage bearer. 

Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control 
of industry is given, in that the “roundabout process 
of production” yields an income above the subsistence 
of the workmen engaged in it, and the material equip¬ 
ment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live stock, mechan¬ 
ical contrivances) binds this roundabout process of in¬ 
dustry to a more or less determinate place and routine, 
such as to make surveillance and control possible. So 
far as the workman under the new phase of technology 
is dependent for his living on the apparatus and the 
orderly sequence of the “roundabout process” his work 
may be controlled and the surplus yielded by his indus¬ 
try may be turned to account; it becomes worth while 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 151 

to own the material means of industry, and ownership 
of the material means in such a situation carries with it 
the usufruct of the community’s immaterial equipment 
of technological proficiency. 

The substantial fact upon which the strategy of owner¬ 
ship converges is this usufruct of the industrial arts, and 
the tangible items of property to which the claims of 
ownership come to attach will accordingly vary from 
time to time, according as the state of the industrial 
arts will best afford an effectual exploitation of this 
usufruct through the tenure of one or another of the 
material items requisite to the pursuit of industry. The 
chief subject of ownership may accordingly be the cul¬ 
tivated trees, as in some of the South Sea islands; or the 
tillable land, as happens in many of the agricultural 
communities; or fish weirs and their location, as on some 
of the salmon streams of the American north-west coast; 
or domestic animals, as is typical of the pastoral culture; 
or it may be the persons of the workmen, as happens 
under divers circumstances both in pastoral and in agri¬ 
cultural communities; or, with an advance in technology 
of such a nature as to place the mechanical appliances of 
industry in a peculiarly advantageous position for en¬ 
grossing the roundabout processes of production, as in the 
latterday machine industry, these mechanical appliances 
may become the typical category of industrial wealth 
and so come to be accounted “productive goods” in 
some eminent sense. 

The institutional change by which a pecuniary regula¬ 
tion of industry comes into effect may take one form or 
another, but its outcome has commonly been some form 
of ownership of tangible goods. Particularly has that 


152 The Instinct of Workmanship 

i 

been the outcome in the course of development that has 
led on to those great pecuniary cultures of which Occi¬ 
dental civilisation is the most perfect example. But 
just in what form the move will be made, if at all, from 
free workmanship to pecuniary industry and ownership, 
is in good part a question of what the material situation 
of the community will permit. In some instances the 
circumstances have apparently not permitted the move 
to be made at all. The Eskimo culture is perhaps an 
extreme case of this kind. The state of the industrial 
arts among them has apparently gone appreciably be¬ 
yond the technological juncture indicated above as 
critical in this respect. It involves a considerable special¬ 
isation and accumulation of appliances, such as boats, 
sleds, dogs, harness, various special forms of nets, har¬ 
poons and spears, and an elaborate line of minor appara¬ 
tus necessary to the day’s work and embodying a mi¬ 
nutely standardised technique. At the same time these 
articles of use, together with their household and per¬ 
sonal effects, represent something appreciable in the 
way of portable wealth. Yet in their economic (pecuni¬ 
ary and industrial), domestic, social, or religious institu¬ 
tions the Eskimo have substantially not gone beyond 
the point of customary regulation commonly associated 
with the simpler, hand-to-mouth state of the industrial 
arts typical of the palaeolithic savage culture. And this 
archaic Eskimo culture, with its highly elaborated 
technology, is apparently of untold antiquity; it is even 
believed by competent students of antiquity to have 
stood over without serious advance or decline since Euro¬ 
pean palaeolithic times—a period of not less than ten 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 153 

thousand years. 1 The causes conditioning this “ back¬ 
ward” type of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with 
a relatively advanced and extremely complete techno¬ 
logical system, are presumed to lie in their material 
surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a 
congestion of people within a small area or enable the or¬ 
ganisation and control of a compact community of any 
considerable size; while on the other hand they exact 
a large degree of co-operation and common interest, on 
pain of extreme hardship if not of extinction. 

More perplexing at first sight is the case of such seden¬ 
tary agricultural communities as the Pueblo Indians, who 
have also not advanced very materially beyond the simpler 
cultural scheme of savage life, and have not taken seri¬ 
ously to a system of property and a pecuniary control of 
industry, in spite of their having achieved a very con¬ 
siderable advance in the industrial arts, particularly 
in agriculture, such as would appear to entitle them to 
something “ higher ” than that state of peaceable, non- 
coercive social organisation, in which they were found 
on their first contact with civilised men, with maternal 
descent and mother-goddesses, and without much prop¬ 
erty rights, accumulated wealth or pecuniary distinc¬ 
tion of classes. Again an explanation is probably to be 
sought in special circumstances of environment, perhaps 
re-enforced by peculiarities of the racial endowment; 
though the latter point seems doubtful, since both lin¬ 
guistically and anthropometrically the Pueblos are 
found to belong to two or three distinct stocks, at the 
same time that their culture is notably uniform through¬ 
out the Pueblo region, both on the technological and on 

1 Cf. W. G. Sollas, Ancient Hunters . 


154 The Instinct of Workmanship 

the institutional side. The peculiar material circum¬ 
stances that appear to have conditioned the Pueblo 
culture are (a) a habitat which favours agricultural settle¬ 
ment only at isolated and widely separated spots, (6) 
sites for habitation (on detached mesas or on other diffi¬ 
cult hills or in isolated valleys or canyons) easily secured 
against aggression from without and not affording notable 
differential advantages or admitting segregation of the 
population within the pueblo, ( c ) the absence of beasts 
of burden, such as have enabled the inhabitants of anal¬ 
ogous regions of the old world effectually to cover long 
distances and make raiding a lucrative, or at least an 
attractive enterprise. 

These, and other peculiar instances of what may per¬ 
haps be called cultural retardation, indicate by way of 
exception what may have been the ruling causes that 
have governed in the advance to a higher culture under 
more ordinary circumstances,—by “ ordinary” being 
intended such circumstances as have apparently led to a 
different and, it would be held, a more normal result in 
the old world, and particularly in the region of the West¬ 
ern civilisation. 

In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an ad¬ 
vance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumula¬ 
tion of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial 
equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation 
of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, 
will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing 
on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the 
land employed in their production. What has seemed 
the most natural and obvious beginnings of property 
rights, in the view of those economists who have taken 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 155 

an interest in the matter, is the storing up of valuables 
by such of the ancient workmen as were enabled, by 
efficiency, diligence or fortuitous gains, to produce some¬ 
what more than their current consumption. There are 
difficulties, though perhaps not insuperable, in the way 
of such a genesis of property rights and pecuniary dif¬ 
ferentiation within any given community. The temper 
of the people bred in the ways of the simpler plan of 
hand-to-mouth and common interest does not readily 
lend itself to such an institutional innovation, even 
though the self-regarding impulses of particular members 
of the community may set in such a direction as would 
give the alleged result. 1 

There are other and more natural ways of reaching 
the same results, ways more consonant with that archaic 
scheme of usages on which the new institution of prop¬ 
erty is to be grafted, (a) In the known cultures of this 
simpler plan there are usually, or at least frequently, 
present a class of magicians (shamans, medicine men y 
angekut), an inchoate priestly class, who get their living 
in part “by their wits,” half parasitically, by some sort 
of tithe levied on their fellow members for supernatural 
ministrations and exploits of faith that are worth as 
much as they will bring. 2 As the industrial efficiency 
of the community increases with the technological gain, 
and an increasing disposable output is at hand, it should 

1 See, e. g., Basil Thomson, The Figians , especially ch. iv, xiv, xxviii, 
xxxi. 

2 The Pueblos offer a curious exception to this common rule of a par¬ 
asitic priesthood. While they are much given to religious observances 
and have an extensive priestly organisation, comprising divers orders and 
sub-orders, this priesthood appears commonly to derive no income, or 
even appreciable perquisites, from their office. 


156 The Instinct of Workmanship 

naturally follow, human nature being what it is, that the 
services of the priests or magicians should suffer an ad¬ 
vance in value and so enable the priests to lay something 
by, to acquire a special claim to certain parcels of land 
or cultivated trees or crops or first-fruits or labour to be 
performed by their parishioners. There is no limit to 
the value of such ministrations except the limit of toler¬ 
ance, “what the traffic will bear.” And much may be 
done in this way, which is in close touch with the accus¬ 
tomed ways of life among known savages and lower 
barbarians. To the extent to which such a move is suc¬ 
cessful it will alter the economic situation of the com¬ 
munity by making the lay members, in so far, subject to 
the priestly class, and will gather wealth and power in 
the hands of the priests; so introducing a relation of 
master and servant, together with class differences in 
wealth, the practice of exclusive ownership, and pecuni¬ 
ary obligations, (b) With an accumulation of wealth, 
whether in portable form or in the form of plantations 
and tillage, there comes the inducement to aggression, 
predation, by whatever name it may be known. Such 
aggression is an easy matter in the common run of lower 
cultures, since relations are habitually strained between 
these savage and barbarian communities. There is com¬ 
monly a state of estrangement between them amounting 
to constructive feud, though the feud is apt to lie dormant 
under a modus vivendi so long as there is no adequate 
inducement to open hostilities, in the way of booty. 
Given a sufficiently wealthy enemy who is sufficiently 
ill prepared for hostilities to afford a fighting chance of 
taking over this wealth by way of booty or tribute, with 
no obvious chance of due reprisals, and the opening of 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 157 

hostilities will commonly arrange itself. The communi¬ 
ties mutually concerned so pass from the more or less 
precarious peaceful customs and animus common to the 
indigent lower cultures, to a more or less habitual attitude 
of predatory exploit. With the advent of warfare comes 
the war chief, into whose hands authority and pecuniary 
emoluments gather somewhat in proportion as warlike 
exploits and ideals become habitual in the community. 1 
More or less of loot falls into the hands of the victors in 
any raid. The loot may be goods, cattle if any, or men, 
women and children; any or all of which may become 
(private) property and be accumulated in sufficient mass 
to make a difference between rich and poor. Captives 
may fall into some form of servitude, and in an agri¬ 
cultural community may easily become the chief item 
of wealth. At the same time an entire community may 
be reduced to servitude, so falling into the possession of 
an absentee owner (master), or under resident masters 
coming in from the victorious enemy. 

In any or all of these ways the institution of ownership 
is likely to arise so soon as there is provocation for it, 
and in all cases it is a consequence of an appreciable 
advance in the industrial arts. Yet in a number of re¬ 
corded cases a sufficient advance in technology does not 
appear to have been followed by so prompt an introduc¬ 
tion of ownership, at least not in the fully developed 

1 The difference in importance and powers between the war chief of the 
peaceable Pueblos on the one hand and of the predatory Aztecs on the 
other hand shows how such an official’s status may change de facto with¬ 
out a notable change de jure. —Cf. also Basil Thomson, The Figians, 
ch. iv, xxxi, on “Constitution of Society,” and “The Tenure of Land,” 
where the growth of custom is shown to throw pecuniary prerogative 
and control into the hands of the successful war chief. 


158 The Instinct of Workmanship 

J 

form, as the surface facts would seem to have called for. 
Custom in the lower cultures is extremely tenacious, and 
what might seem an excessive allowance of time appears 
to be needed for so radical an innovation in the habitual 
scheme of things as is involved in the installation of 
rights of ownership. There are cases of a fairly advanced 
barbarian culture, with sufficiently coercive government 
control, an authoritative priesthood, and well-marked 
class distinctions which hold good both in economic and 
social relations, and yet where the line of demarkation 
between ownership and mastery is not drawn in any 
unambiguous fashion—where it is perhaps as accurate 
a statement as the case permits, to say that this distinc¬ 
tion has not yet been made, and so would, if applied, 
mark a difference that does not yet exist. 1 

So long as overt predatory conditions continue to rule 
the case,—e. g., so long as the community in question 
continues, in a sense, under martial law, “in a state of 
seige,” where the holders of the economic advantage 
hold it on a tenure of prowess or by way of delegated 
power and prerogative from a superior of warlike ante¬ 
cedents and dynastic right,—so long the rights of owner¬ 
ship are not likely to be well differentiated from those of 
mastery. Much the same characterisation of such a 

1 For instance, somewhat generally in the island states of Polynesia. 
Something suggestively reminiscent of such a condition of things is visible 
in early feudal Europe, where feudal holdings changed hands with a 
change in the status of their holders in a way that suggests that ownership 
was in great measure a corollary following from the tenure of certain civil 
powers. So, also, in ecclesiastical holdings of the same period and later. 
And, again, in the doubtful and changing status of the servile classes of 
feudal Europe, where the distinction between mastery and ownership 
often seems something of a legal fiction or a distinction without a dif¬ 
ference. Feudal Japan affords evidence to much the same effect. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 159 

state of things is conveyed in the current phrase that 
“ the rights of person and property are not secure. 57 The 
very wide prevalence in the barbarian cultures of some 
such state of things argues that the genesis of property 
rights is likely to have been something of this kind in the 
common run, though it does not in other cases preclude a 
different and more peaceable development out of work¬ 
manlike or priestly economies. 

But even if it should be found, when the matter has 
been sifted, that the genesis of ownership is of the latter 
land, it would also in all probability be found that among 
the peoples whose institutional growth has a serious 
genetic bearing on the Western culture the holding of 
property has, late or early, passed through a phase of 
predatory tenure in which the distinction between owner¬ 
ship and mastery has so far fallen into abeyance as to 
have had but a slight effect on the further development. 
Where, as appears frequently to have been the case both 
in Europe and elsewhere, the kingship and temporal 
power has arisen out of the priestly office and spiritual 
power—or perhaps better where the inchoate kingship 
was in its origins chiefly of a priestly complexion, with a 
gradual shifting of kingly power and prerogative to a 
temporal basis, 1 —there the transition from a creation of 
property and mastery rights by priestly economies 
(fraud?) to a tenure of wealth and authority by royal 
prerogative (force?) will have so blended the two methods 


1 Cf. J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship. The 
drift of evidence for the North-European cultures of pagan antiquity 
appears to set strongly in this direction, though the term “priestly,” 
as applied to these pagan kings, is likely to convey too broad an implica¬ 
tion of solemnity and vicariously divine power. 


160 The Instinct of Workmanship 

\ \ . • * *, %. 

• , ' •, • • * i i • * 

of genesis as to leave the attempt at a hard and fast dis¬ 
crimination between them somewhat idle. 

But whatever may be conceived to have been the 
genesis of ownership, the institution is commonly found, 
in the barbarian culture, to be tempered with a large 
infusion of predatory concepts, of status, prerogative, 
differential respect of persons and economic classes, and 
a corresponding differential respect of occupations. 
Whether property provokes to predation or predation 
initiates ownership, the situation that results in early 
phases of the pecuniary culture is much the same; and 
the causal relation in which this situation stands to the 
advance in workmanship is also much the same. This 
relation between workmanship and the pecuniary cul¬ 
ture brought on with the advent of ownership is a two¬ 
fold one, or, perhaps better, it is a relation of mutual give 
and take. The increase in industrial efficiency due to a 
sufficient advance in the industrial arts gives rise to the 
ownership of property and to pecuniary appreciations 
of men and things, occupations and products, habits, 
customs, usages, observances, services and goods. At the 
same time, since predation and warlike exploit are in¬ 
timately associated with the facts of ownership through 
its early history (perhaps throughout its history), there 
results a marked accentuation of the self-regarding senti¬ 
ments; with the economically important consequence 
that self-interest displaces the common good in men’s 
ideals and aspirations. The animus entailed by preda¬ 
tory exploit is one of self-interest, a seeking of one’s own 
advantage at the cost of the enemy, which frequently, 
in the poetically ideal case, takes such an extreme form 
as to prefer the enemy’s loss to one’s own gain. And in 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 161 


» 


the emulation which the predatory life and its distinction? 
of wealth introduce into the community, the end of en¬ 
deavour is likely to become the differential advantage of 
the individual as against his neighbours rather than the 
undifferentiated advantage of the group as a whole, in 
contrast with alien or hostile groups. The members of 
the community come to work each for his own interest 
in severalty, rather than for an undivided interest in 
the common lot. Such sentiment of group solidarity 
as there may remain falls also into the invidious and 
emulative form; whereby the fighting patriot becomes 
the type and exemplar of the public spirited citizen, 
whose ideal then is to follow his leader and humble the 
pride of those whom the chances of contention have 
thrown in with the other side of the game. The senti¬ 
ment of common interest, itself in good part a diffuse 
working-out of the parental instinct, comes at the best 
to converge on the glory of the flag instead of the fulness 
of life of the community at large, or more commonly it 
comes to be centred in loyalty, that is to say in sub¬ 
servience, to the common war-chief and his dynastic 
successors. 

In the shifting of activities, ideals and aims so brought 
in with the advent of wealth and ownership, the part of 
the priests and their divinities is not to be overlooked, 
for herein lies one of the greater cultural gains brought 
on by the technological advance at this juncture. The 
margin of service and produce available for consumption 
in the cult increases, and by easy consequence the spirit¬ 
ual prestige and the temporal power and prerogatives 
of the priesthood grow greater. The jurisdiction of the 
gods of the victors is extended, through the vicarious 


16 2 The Instinct of Workmanship 

power of the priests, over the subject peoples, and as 
the temporal dominion is enlarged and an increasing 
measure of coercion is employed in controlling these 
dominions, so also in the affairs of the gods and their 
priests there is an accession of power and dignity. It 
commonly happens where predatory enterprise comes 
to be habitual and successful that the temporal power 
tends to centre in an autocratic and arbitrary ruler; 
and in this as in so much else, spiritual affairs are likely 
to take their complexion from the temporal, resulting 
in a strong drift toward an autocratic monotheism, which 
in the finished case comes to a climax in an omnipotent, 
omniscient deity of very exalted dignity and very exact¬ 
ing temper. For the habits of thought enforced in the 
affairs of daily life are carried over into men’s sense of 
what is right and good in the life of the gods as well. If 
there is any choice among the gods under whose auspices 
a people has successfully entered on a career of predation, 
so that some of the gods have more of a reputation for 
rapacity and inhumanity than others, the most atrocious 
among them is likely, other things being equal, to become 
the war-god of the conquering host, and so eventually to 
be exalted to the suzerainty among the gods, and even 
in time to become the one and only incumbent of the 
divine czardom. 

Should it happen that a relatively humane, tolerant 
and tractable deity comes in for exaltation to the 
divine suzerainty, as well may be if such a one has 
already a good prior claim standing over from the 
more peaceable past, he will readily acquire the due 
princely arrogance and irresponsibility that vests the 
typical heavenly king. It may be added that as a matter 



The Technology of the Predatory Culture 163 

of course no degree of imputed inhumanity in the most 
high God will stand in the way of a god-fearing and 
astute priesthood volubly ascribing to him all the good 
qualities that should grace an elderly patriarchal gentle¬ 
man of the old school; so that even his most infamous 
atrocities become ineffably meritorious and are dispensed 
of his mercy. 1 

With the terrors of a jealous and almighty God behind 
them, and with faith in their own mission and sagacity 
in its administration, the priesthood are in a position 
to make the claims of the heavenly king count for much 
in the affairs of men; more particularly since this spiritual 
power enters into working arrangements with the tem¬ 
poral power; so that in the outcome these institutions 
which in their origins have grown out of a precarious 
margin of product above subsistence come to possess 
themselves of the output at large and leave a precarious 
margin of subsistence to the community at large. 2 

These further matters of “ natural law in the spiritual 
world” are not in themselves of direct interest to the 
present inquiry, and they are also matters of somewhat 
tedious commonplace. Yet this run of things has grave 
consequences in the further working-out of the tech¬ 
nological situation as well as in the course of material 
welfare for the community on whom it is incumbent to 
turn the technological knowledge to account, to conserve 
or improve and transmit it, and for this reason it has 

1 Witness the alleged dealings of Jahve with His chosen people and the 
laudation bestowed on Him by His priests for “conduct unbecoming a 
gentleman.” 

2 As witness Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Peru, Babylon, Assyria, Israel 
under Solomon and his nearer successors. 


164 The Instinct of Workmanship 

seemed necessary summarily to recall those general 
features of the cultural scheme that are inherently asso¬ 
ciated with the earlier pecuniary culture,—the full-blown 
barbarian culture. And it seems pertinent also to add 
something further in the same connection before leaving 
this aspect of the case. 

It is necessary to hark back to what was said in an 
earlier chapter, of the relations of tillage and cattle-breed¬ 
ing to the instinct of workmanship and the course of 
technological advance. Both the technological and the 
institutional bearing of cattle-breeding is particularly 
notable in this connection. As already spoken of in 
what has gone before, cattle-breeding has the techno¬ 
logical peculiarity that it may be successfully entered 
on and carried forward with a larger admixture of an¬ 
thropomorphic concepts than the mechanic arts, or 
even than the domestication and care of the crop plants. 
It is perhaps not to be admitted that the penchant of 
early man to take an anthropomorphic view of the lower 
animals and impute to them the common traits of human 
nature has directly conduced to their successful domesti¬ 
cation, but it should be within the mark to say that this 
penchant may have been primarily responsible for the 
course of conduct that led to the domestication of ani¬ 
mals, 1 and that it has apparently never been a serious 
drawback to any pastoral culture. Now, wealth in flocks 
and herds is peculiar not only in being eminently portable, 
even to the extent that in the usual course of tills in¬ 
dustry it is necessary for a pastoral community to mi¬ 
grate or to go over an extended itinerary with the chang¬ 
ing seasons, but it has also the peculiar quality of mul- 
1 See F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion , ch. x. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 165 

tiplying spontaneously, given only a degree of surveil¬ 
lance and a sufficient range of pasture lands. It follows 
that cattle are easy and tempting to acquire by preda¬ 
tion, will accumulate through natural increase without 
notable exertion on the part of their owners, and will 
multiply beyond the bearing capacity of any disposable 
range. Hence a pastoral people, or a people given in 
great part to pastoral pursuits, will somewhat readily 
take to a predatory life; will have to be organised for 
defence (and offence) against raids or encroachments 
from its neighbours engaged in the same pursuits; will 
find itself short of range lands through the natural in¬ 
crease of its flocks or herds, and so will even involuntarily 
be brought into feud with neighbouring herdsmen through 
mutual trespass. Further, the work of herding, on the 
scale imposed by the open continental cattle and sheep 
ranges, is man’s work, as is also the incidental fighting, 
raiding, and cattle-lifting. 

The effects of these technological conditions on the \j 
general culture of a pastoral people are such as are set 
forth in their most favourable light in the early historical 
books of the Old Testament, or such conditions as may 
be found today on the great cattle ranges of west and 
north-central Asia. The community falls necessarily 
into a patriarchal regime; with considerable concentra¬ 
tion of wealth in individual hands; great disparity in 
wealth and social standing, commonly involving both 
chattel slavery and serfdom; a fighting organisation 
under patriarchal-despotic leadership, which serves both 
for civil, political and religious purposes; domestic in¬ 
stitutions of the same cast, involving a degree of subjec¬ 
tion of women and children and commonly polygamy 


166 The Instinct of Workmanship 

for the patriarchal upper or ruling class; a religious sys¬ 
tem of a monotheistic or monarchical complexion and 
drawn on lines of patriarchal despotism; with the priestly 
office vested in the patriarchal head of the community 
(the eldest male of the eldest male line) if the group is 
small enough to admit the administration of both the 
temporal and spiritual power at the hands of one man— 
as Israel at the time of the earlier sojourn in Canaan—or 
vested in a specialised priesthood if the group is of great 
l ( size—as Israel on their return to Palestine. 

Such a culture is manifestly fit to succeed both in 
avowedly predatory enterprise and in pecuniary enter¬ 
prise of a more peaceable sort, so long as range lands are 
at its disposal or so long as it can find a sufficiently large 
and compact agricultural community to reduce to servi¬ 
tude, or so long as it can find ways and means of com¬ 
mercial enterprise while still occupying a position defen¬ 
sible against all comers. Its population is organised 
for offence and defence and trained in the habits of subor¬ 
dination necessary to any successful war, and the pa¬ 
triarchal authority and pecuniary ideals inbred in them 
give them facility in co-operation against aliens, as well 
as the due temper for successful bargaining. Such a 
culture has the elements of national strength and solid¬ 
arity, given only some adequate means of subsistence 
while still retaining its militant patriarchal organisation. 
Not least among its elements of national strength is its 
religion, which fosters the national pride of a people 
chosen by the Most High, at the same time that it trains 
the population in habits of subordination and loyalty, 
as well as in patient submission to exactions. But it is 
essentially a parasitic culture, despotic, and, with due 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 167 

-- - ^ . _ _ « M *i. r 

training, highly superstitious or religious. What a people 
of these antecedents is capable of is shown by the As¬ 
syrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, the Hindu in¬ 
vaders of India, the Hyksos invaders of Egypt, and in 
another line by Israel and the Phoenicians, and in a 
lesser degree by the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Arabs and 
Turks. 

It is from peoples of this culture that the great reli¬ 
gions of the old world have come, near or remote, but it 
is not easy to find any substantial contribution to human 
culture drawn indubitably from this source apart from 
religious creed, cult and poetry. The domestication of 
animals, for instance, is not due to them; with the possible 
exception of the horse and the dog, that work had to be 
done in peaceable, sedentary communities, from whom 
the pastoral nomads will have taken over the stock 
and the industry and carried it out on a scale and with 
cultural consequences which do not follow from cattle- 
breeding under sedentary conditions. Their religion, 
on the other hand, seems in no case to have been carried 
up to the consummate stage of despotic monotheism 
during the nomadic-pastoral phase of their experience, 
but to have been worked out to a finished product pres¬ 
ently after they had engaged on a career of conquest 
and had some protracted experience of warfare and 
despotism on a relatively large scale. The history of 
these great civilisations with pastoral antecedents ap¬ 
pears to run somewhat uniformly to the effect that they 
collapsed as soon as they had eaten their host into a 
collapse. The incidents along the way between their 
beginning in conquest and their collapse in exhaustion 
are commonly no more edifying and of no more lasting 


168 The Instinct of Workmanship 

y 

significance to human culture than those which have 
similarly marked the course of the Turk. These great 
monarchies were organised by and for an intrusive dy¬ 
nasty and ruling class, of pastoral antecedents, and they 
drew their subsistence and their means of oppression 
from a subjugated agricultural population. In the course 
of this further elaboration of a predatory civilisation, the 
institutions proper to a large scale and to a powerful des¬ 
potism and nobility resting on a servile people, were 
developed into a finished system; in which the final 
arbiter is always irresponsible force and in which the 
all-pervading social relation is personal subservience and 
personal authority. The mechanic arts make little if 
any progress under such a discipline of personalities, 
even the arts of w r ar, and there is little if any evidence of 
sensible gain in any branch of husbandry. There were 
great palaces and cities built by slave labour and corvee, 
embodying untold misery in conspicuously wasteful and 
tasteless show, and great monarchs whose boast it was 
that they were each and several the best friend or nearest 
relative of some irresponsible and supreme god, and 
whose dearest claim to pre-eminence was that they 
“walked on the faces of the black-head race.” Seen in 
perspective and rated in any terms that have a work¬ 
manlike significance, these stupendous dynastic fabrics 
are as insignificant as they are large, and none of them is 
worth the least of the fussy little communities that came 
in time to make up the Hellenic world and its petty 
squabbles. 

In their general traits these various civilisations 
founded (in conquest) by the pastoral peoples are of the 
same character as is the pecuniary culture as found 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 169 

'1 '' 

V 

elsewhere, but they have certain special features which 
set them off somewhat in a class by themselves. They 
are predatory in a peculiarly overt and accentuated 
degree, so that their institutions foster the invidious 
sentiments, the self-regarding animus of servility and of 
arrogance, beyond what commonly happens in the 
pecuniary culture at large; and they carry a large content 
of peculiarly high-wrought religious superstitions and 
fear of the supernatural, which likewise works out from 
and into an animus of servility and arrogance. In these 
cultures it is true, even beyond the great significance 
which the proposition has in the barbarian culture else¬ 
where, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. 
The discipline of life in such a culture, therefore, is con¬ 
sistently unfavourable to any technological gain; the in¬ 
stinct of workmanship is constantly dominated by prev¬ 
alent habits of thought that are worse than useless for 
any technological purpose. 

Much the same, of course, is true for any civilisation 
founded on personal government of the coercive kind, 
whatever may be the remoter antecedents of the dynastic 
and ruling classes; but these other cultures have not the 
same secure and ancient patriarchal foundation, ready 
to hand, and so they are constrained to build their insti¬ 
tutions of coercion, domestic, civil, political and military, 
more slowly and with a more doubtful outcome; nor 
does their religious system so readily work out in a 
monarchical theology with an omnipotent sovereign and 
in all-pervading fear of God. A home-bred despotism 
in an agricultural community that has set out with ma¬ 
ternal descent, a matriarchal clan system, and mother 
goddesses, is hampered both on the temporal and the 



170 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


spiritual side by ancient and inbred usage and preconcep¬ 
tions that can be effectually overcome only in the long 
course of time. The civilisations of Asia-Minor and the 
Aegean region, and even of Egypt and Rome, however 
much of pastoral and patriarchal elements may have 
been infused into them in the course of time, show their 
shortcomings in this respect to the last; perhaps in their 
religions more than in any other one cultural trait, since 
religion is after all an epigenetic feature and follows 
rather than leads in the unfolding of the cultural scheme. 

But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral 
antecedents have no grave significance for the modern 
culture, except as drawbacks, and none at all for modern 
technology or for that matter-of-fact knowledge on which 
modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose 
cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also 
had their warlike experience, late and early, but it seems 
never to have reached the consummate outcome to be 
seen in the East. Neither as regards the scale on which 
dynastic organisation has been carried out nor as regards 
the thoroughness with which their institutions have been 
permeated by predatory preconceptions have the West¬ 
ern peoples in their earlier history approached the stand¬ 
ard of the oriental despotisms. Even now, it may be 
remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly 
speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory re¬ 
gime as being a necessity of defence rather than some¬ 
thing to be desired on its own merits. Not that the 
predatory regime has not been a sufficiently grave fact 
in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such a, 
view of history one would have to overlook the Roman 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 171 

Empire, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the 
Catholic church, the Era of state-making, and the exist¬ 
ing armed neutrality of the powers; but these have, all 
but the last, proved to be episodes on a grand scale 
rather than such an historical finality as any one of the 
successive monarchies in the Mesopotamian-Chaldaean 
country,—the test being that occidental civilisation has 
not died of any one of these maladies, though it has 
come through more than one critical period. 

Western civilisation has gone through these eras of 
accentuated predation and has at all times shown an 
appreciable admixture of predatory conceptions in its 
scheme of institutions and ideals, in its domestic institu¬ 
tions and its public affairs, in its art and religion, but it is 
after all within the mark to say that, at least since the 
close of the Dark Ages, a distinctive characteristic that 
sets off this civilisation in contradistinction from any 
definitively predatory phase of the pecuniary culture, 
has been a pertinacious pursuit of the arts of peace, to 
which those peoples that have led in this civilisation 
have ever returned at every respite. For an apprecia¬ 
tion of the relations subsisting between the sense of 
workmanship and the discipline of habituation in the 
modern culture, therefore, the phenomena of peaceful 
ownership are of greater, or at least of more vivid interest 
than those of the predatory phase of the pecuniary cul¬ 
ture. 

Modern civilisation, and indeed all history for that 
matter, lies within the pecuniary culture as a whole; but 
the Western culture of modern times belongs, perhaps 
somewhat precariously, to the secondary or peaceable 
phase of this pecuniary culture, rather than to that preda- 


172 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tory phase with which the pecuniary scheme of life began 
somewhere in the lower barbarism, and that has re¬ 
peatedly closed its life cycle in the collapse of one and 
another of the great dynastic empires of the old world. 

As in the predatory phase, so also in the peaceable 
pecuniary culture, the dominant note is given by the 
self-regarding impulses; and the sense of workmanship 
is therefore characteristically hedged about and guided 
by the institutional exigencies and preconceptions inci¬ 
dent to life under the circumstances imposed by owner¬ 
ship,—in a situation where the economic interest, the 
interest in those material means of life with which work¬ 
manship has to deal, converges on property rights. 
Ownership is self-regarding, of course, and the rights of 
ownership are of a personal, invidious, differential, emu¬ 
lative nature; although in the peaceable phase of the 
civilisation of ownership, force and fraud are, in theory, 
barred out of the game of acquisition,—wherein this 
differs from the predatory phase proper. 

An obvious consequence following immediately on the 
emergence of ownership in any community is an increased 
application to work. This has been taken as a matter 
of course in theoretical speculations and is borne out 
by the observation of peoples among whom trade rela¬ 
tions have been introduced in recent times. An im¬ 
mediate result is greater diligence, accompanied ap¬ 
parently in all cases, if the reports of observers are to be 
accepted, by an increase in contention, distrust and 
chicanery 1 and an increasingly wasteful consumption of 
goods. The diligence so fostered by emulative self- 
interest is directed to the acquisition of property, in 
1 Cf., e. g., Basil Thomson, The Figians, ch. iv. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 173 

great part to the acquisition of more than is possessed 
by those others with whom the invidious comparison in 
ownership is made; and under the spur of ownership 
simply, it is only secondarily, as a means to the emulative 
end of acquisition, that productive work, and therefore 
workmanship in its naive sense, comes into the case at 
all. Ownership conduces to diligence in acquisition 
and therefore indirectly to diligence in work, if no more 
expeditious means of acquiring wealth can be devised. 
In its first incidence the incentive to diligence afforded 
by ownership is a proposition in business not in work¬ 
manship. Its effects on workmanship, industry and 
technology, therefore, are necessarily somewhat uncer¬ 
tain and uneven. Apparently from the start there is 
some appreciable resort to fraudulent thrift, to the pro¬ 
duction of spurious or inferior goods. 1 This of course 
very presently is corrected in the increased astuteness 
and vigilance exercised in men’s dealings with one an¬ 
other, whereby an appreciable portion of energy goes to 
defeat these artifices of disingenuous worldly wisdom. 

It should be added that the pecuniary incentive to 
work takes the direction of making the most of the means 
at hand, considered as means of pecuniary gain rather 
than as means of serviceability, and that it conduces 
therefore to the fullest (pecuniary) exploitation of the 
standard accepted ways and means of industry rather 
than to the improvement of these ways and means be¬ 
yond the conjuncture at hand. Further, though this is 
also somewhat of a tedious commonplace, since the 

1 As shown, for instance, by the pottery and baskets made for trade 
by the American Indians where they come in trade contact with civilised 


men. 


174 The Instinct of Workmanship 

only authentic end of work under the pecuniary dispensa¬ 
tion is the acquisition of wealth; since the possession of 
wealth in so far exempts its possessor from productive 
work; and since such exemption is a mark of wealth and 
therefore of superiority over those who have nothing and 
therefore must work; it follows that addiction to work 
becomes a mark of inferiority and therefore discreditable. 
Whereby work becomes distasteful to all men instructed 
in the proprieties of the pecuniary culture; and it has 
even become so irksome to men trained in the punctilios 
of the servile, predatory, phase of this culture that it 
was once credibly proclaimed by a shrewd priesthood as 
the most calamitous curse laid on mankind by a vindic¬ 
tive God. Also, since wealth affords means for a free 
consumption of goods, the conspicuous consumption of 
goods becomes a mark of pecuniary excellence, and so it 
becomes an element of respectability in any pecuniary 
culture, and presently becomes a meritorious act and 
even a requirement of pecuniary decency. The outcome 
is conspicuous wastefulness of consumption, the limits 
of which, if any, have apparently not been approached 
hitherto. 1 

The bearings of this pecuniary culture on workman¬ 
ship and technology are wide and diverse. Most im¬ 
mediate and perhaps most notable is the conventional 
disesteem of labour spoken of above, which seems to follow 
as a necessary consequence from the institution of owner¬ 
ship in all cases where distinctions of wealth are at all 

1 For a more detailed discussion of these secondary consequences of the 
institution of ownership, the irksomeness of labour and the conspicuous 
waste of goods, which cannot be pursued here, see The Theory of the 
Leisure Class , ch. ii-vi. 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 175 

considerable or where property rights are associated with 
facts of mastery and prestige. The pecuniary disrepute 
of labour acts to discourage industry, but this may be 
offset, at least in part, by the incentive given to emulation 
by the good repute attaching to acquisition. The waste¬ 
ful expenditure of goods and services enjoined by the 
pecuniary canons of conspicuous consumption gives an 
economically untoward direction to industry, at the 
same time that it greatly increases the hardships and 
curtails the amenities of life. So also, estrangement and 
distrust between persons, classes and nations necessarily 
pervades this cultural era, due to the incessant gnawing of 
incompatible pecuniary interests; and this state of affairs 
appreciably lowers the aggregate efficiency of human 
industry and sets up bootless obstacles to be overcome 
and irrelevant asperities to be put up with. 

These and the like consequences of pecuniary emula¬ 
tion are simple, direct and obvious; but the discipline 
of the pecuniary culture bears on workmanship also in 
a more subtle way, indirect and less evident at first sight. 
The discipline of daily life imparts its own bent to the 
sense of workmanship through habituation of the work¬ 
man to that scheme and logic of things that rules this 
pecuniary culture. The outcome as concerns industry 
is somewhat equivocal; the discipline of self-seeking at 
some points favours workmanship and at others not. 
At one period or phase of the pecuniary culture, generally 
speaking an early or crude phase, the bent so given to 
workmanship and technology seems necessarily to be 
conducive to inefficiency; at another (later or maturer) 
phase the contrary is likely to be true. 

The pecuniary discipline of invidious emulation takes 


176 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


effect on the state of the industrial arts chiefly and most 
pervasively through the bias which it gives to the knowl¬ 
edge on which workmanship proceeds. It may be called 
to mind that the body of knowledge (facts) turned to 
account in workmanship, the facts made use of in devising 
technological processes and appliances, are of the nature 
of habits of thought. This is particularly applicable to 
those (tactical) principles under whose control the in¬ 
formation in hand is construed and connected up into a 
system of uses, agencies and instrumentalities. These 
habits of thought, elements of knowledge, items of in¬ 
formation, accepted facts, principles of reality, in part 
represent the mechanical behaviour of objects, the brute 
nature of brute matter, and in part they stand for quali¬ 
ties, aptitudes and proclivities imputed to external ob¬ 
jects and their behaviour and so infused into the facts 
and the generalisations based on them. The sense of 
workmanship has much to do with this imputation of 
traits to the phenomena of observation, perhaps more 
than any other of the proclivities native to man. The 
traits so imputed to the facts are in the main such as 
will be consonant with the sense of workmanship and 
will lend themselves to a concatenation in its terms. But 
this infusion of traits into the facts of observation, 
whether it takes effect at the instance of the sense of 
workmanship, or conceivably on impulse not to be iden¬ 
tified with this instinct, is a logical process and is carried 
out by an intelligence whose logical processes have in all 
cases been profoundly biassed by habituation. So that 
the habits of fife of the individual, and therefore of the 
community made up of such individuals, will pervasively 
and unremittingly bend this work of imputation with the 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 177 

•.13 K: J ! ' j? 

set of their own current, and will accordingly involve 
incoming elements of knowledge in a putative system of 
relations consistent with these habits of life. This com¬ 
prehensive scheme of habitual apprehensions and ap¬ 
preciations is what is called the “genius,” spirit, or 
character of any given culture. In all this range of 
habitual preconceptions touching the nature of things 
there prevails a degree of solidarity, of mutual support 
and re-enforcement among the several lines of habitual 
activity comprised in the current scheme of life; so that 
a certain characteristic tone or bias runs through the 
whole,—in so far as the cultural situation has attained 
that degree of maturity or assimilation that will allow 
it to be spoken of as a distinctive whole, standing out 
as a determinate and coherent phase in the life-history 
of the race. To this bias of scope and method in the 
current scheme of life, intellectual and sentimental, any 
new element or item must be assimilated if it is not to be 
rejected as alien and unreal or to fall through by neglect. 

All this bears on the scope and method of knowledge, 
and therefore on the facts made use of in the industrial 
arts, just as it bears on any other feature of human life 
that is of the nature of habit. And the immediate ques¬ 
tion is as to the bias or drift of the pecuniary culture as 
it affects the apprehension of facts serviceable for tech¬ 
nological ends. This pecuniary bias or bent may be 
described as invidious, personal, emulative, looking to 
differential values in respect of personal force or compet¬ 
itive success, looking to gradations in respect of com¬ 
parative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety, rep¬ 
utability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute 
preclude the well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, 


178 The Instinct of Workmanship 

* 'v. 

from inquiring narrowly into the facts of technology, 
since these things are beneath their dignity, conven¬ 
tionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters can 
not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without 
offence and humiliation be canvassed at all intimately 
among the better class. At the same time pecuniary 
competition, when carried to its ideal pitch, works the 
lower industrial classes to exhaustion and allows them 
no appreciable leisure or energy for indulging any possible 
curiosity of this kind on their part. The habitual (ideal) 
frame of mind is that of invidious self-interest on the 
one hand, due to the imperative and ubiquitous need 
of gain in wealth or in rank, and on the other hand class 
discrimination due to the ubiquitous prevalence of dis¬ 
tinctions in prerogative and authentic standing. The 
discipline of the pecuniary religions, or of the religious 
tenets and observances proper to the pecuniary culture, 
runs to a similar effect; more decisively so in the earlier, 
or distinctively predatory, phases of this culture than 
in the peaceable or commercial phase. The vulgar facts 
of industry are beneath the dignity of a feudalistic deity 
or of his priesthood; at the same time that the over¬ 
mastering need of standing well in the graces of an all- 
powerful, exacting and irresponsible God throws a deeper 
shadow of ignobility over the material side of life, and 
makes any workmanlike preoccupation with industrial 
efficiency presumptively sinful as well as indecorous. 

The pecuniary culture is not singular in this matter. 
Always and everywhere the acquirement of knowledge 
is a matter of observation guided and filled out by the 
imputation of qualities, relations and aptitudes to the 
observed phenomena. Without this putative content 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 179 

of active presence and potency the phenomena would 
lack reality; they could not be assimilated in the scheme 
of things human. It is only a commonplace of the logic 
of apperception that the substantial traits of objective 
facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of 
this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation 
of character to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic 
terms; but it is an anthropomorphism which by habit 
conforms to the predatory-pecuniary scheme of precon¬ 
ceptions, such as the routine of life has made ready and 
convincing to men living under the discipline of emu¬ 
lation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary 
decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the 
anthropomorphism of naive workmanship that the puta¬ 
tive reality of facts is to be sought, but in their con¬ 
formity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions 
of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of charac¬ 
ter, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of 
the established institutional values and the ordinances 
of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which 
sense-impressions are reduced to objective fact and so 
become available for use, and under which, again, facts 
are put in practice and turned to technological account, 
are the same canons of invidious distinction that rule 
in the world of property and among men occupied with 
predatory and pecuniary precedence. In effect men and 
things come to be rated in terms of what they (putatively) 
are—their intrinsic character—rather than in terms of 
what they (empirically) will do. 

Without pursuing the question farther at this point, 
it should be evident that the bias of the pecuniary cul¬ 
ture must on the whole act with pervasive force so to 



180 The Instinct of Workmanship 

bend men’s knowledge of the things with which they have 
to do as to lessen its serviceability for technological ends. 
The result is a deflection from matter-of-fact to matter 
of imputation, and the imputation is of the personal 
character here spoken of. The dominant note appears 
to be a differential rating in respect of aggressive self- 
assertion, whether in human or non-human agents. 
Theological preconceptions are commonly strong in the 
pecuniary culture, and under their rule this differential 
rating developes into a scheme of graded powers and 
efficacies vested in the phenomena of external nature by 
delegation from an overruling personal authority. Such 
a bent is necessarily prejudicial to workmanship, and it 
may seem that the ubiquitous repressive force of this 
metaphysics of authority and authenticity should serve 
the same disserviceable end for workmanship as the more 
genial and diffuse anthropomorphism of the lower cul¬ 
tures, but with more decisive effect since it runs in a 
more competently organised, compact and prescriptive 
fashion. 

Where the pecuniary culture has been carried through 
consistently on the predatory plan, without being di¬ 
verted to that commercial phase current in the latterday 
Western civilisation, the conclusion of the matter has 
been decay of the industrial arts and effectual dissipation 
of that system of matter-of-fact knowledge on which 
technological efficiency rests. In the West, where the 
predatory phase proper has eventually given place to a 
commercial phase of the same pecuniary culture, the 
general run of events in this bearing has been a decline 
of knowledge, technology and workmanship, running on 
so long as the predatory (coercive) rule prevailed un- 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 181 

broken, but followed presently by a slow recovery and 
advance in technological efficiency and scientific insight; 
somewhat in proportion as the commercialisation of this 
culture has gained ground, and therefore correlated also 
in a general way with the decline of religious fear. 

This run of events may tempt to the inference that 
while the predatory phase proper of this pecuniary 
civilisation is inimical to matter-of-fact knowledge and 
to technological insight, the rule of commercial ideas 
and ideals characteristic of its subsequent peaceable 
phase acts to propagate these material elements of cul¬ 
ture. But what has already appeared in the course of 
the inquiry into that still earlier cultural phase that 
went before the coercive and invidious regime of preda¬ 
tion suggests that the case is not so simple nor so flatter¬ 
ing to our latterday self-complacency. The self-regarding 
sentiments of arrogance and abasement, out of whose 
free habitual exercise the pecuniary culture, with its 
institutions of prerogative and differential advantage, 
has been built up, are not the spiritual source from which 
such an outcome is to be looked for. These sentiments 
and the instinctive proclivities of which these sentiments 
are the emotional expression are presumed to have re¬ 
mained unchanged in force and character through that 
long course of cumulative habituation that has given 
them their ascendency in the institutions of the pecuniary 
culture, and of their own motion they will yield now re¬ 
sults of the same kind as ever. But the like is true also 
for those other instincts out of whose working came the 
earlier gains made in knowledge and workmanship under 
the savage culture, before the self-regarding sentiments 
underlying the pecuniary culture took the upper hand. 


182 


The Instinct of Workmanship' 


The parental bent and the instincts of workmanship and 
of curiosity will have been overborne by cumulative 
habituation to the rule of the self-regarding proclivities 
that triumphed in the culture of predation, and whose 
dominion has subsequently suffered some impairment 
in the later substitution of property rights for tenure by 
prowess, but these instincts that make for workmanship 

remain as intrinsic to human nature as the others. What 

< 

is to be said for the current commercial scheme of life, 
therefore, appears to be that it is only less inimical to 
the functioning of those instinctive propensities that 
serve the common interest. Hence, gradually, these 
instincts and the non-invidious interests which they 
engender have been coming effectually into bearing again 
as fast as the stern repression of them exercised by the 
full-charged predatory scheme of life has weakened into 
a less and less effectual inhibition, under the discipline 
of compromise and mitigated self-aggrandisement em¬ 
bodied in the rights of property. 

That authentication of ownership out of which the 
sacred rights of property have apparently grown may 
well have arisen as a sort of mutual insurance among 
owners as against the disaffection of the dispossessed; 
which would presently give rise to a sentiment of solid¬ 
arity within the class of owners, would acquire prescrip¬ 
tive force through habitual enforcement, become a matter 
of customary right to be consistently respected under 
the institutional forms of property, and eventuate in 
that highly moralised expression of self-aggrandisement 
which it is today. But with the putting-away of fancy- 
free predation, as being a conventionally disallowed 
means of self-aggrandisement, sentiments of equity and 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 183 
». *■ 
solidarity would presently come in—perhaps at the out¬ 
set by way of disingenuous make-believe—and so the 
way would be made easier under the shelter of this range 
of conceptions for a rehabilitation of the primordial 
parental instinct and its penchant for the common good. 
And when ownership has once been institutionalised in 
this impersonal and quasi-dispassionate form it will lend 
but a decreasingly urgent bias to the cultural scheme 
in the direction of differential respect of persons and a 
differential rating of natural phenomena in respect of 
the occult potencies and efficacies imputed to them. 

As the institutional ground has shifted from free-swung 
predation to a progressively more covert regime of self¬ 
aggrandisement and differential gain, the instinct of 
workmanship has progressively found freer range and 
readier access to its raw material. The differential good 
repute of wealth and rank has of course continued to 
be of much the same nature in the later (commercial) 
stages of the pecuniary culture as in the earlier (preda¬ 
tory) stages. An aristocratic (or servile) scheme of life 
must necessarily run in invidious terms, since that is the 
whole meaning of the phenomenon; and resting as any 
such scheme does on pecuniary distinctions, whether 
direct or through the intermediary term of predatory 
exploit, it will necessarily involve the corollary that 
wealth and exemption from work (otium cum dignitate) is 
honourable and that poverty and work is dishonourable. 
But with the progressive commercialisation of gain and 
ownership it also comes to pass that peaceable applica¬ 
tion to the business in hand may have much to do with 
the acquirement of a reputable standing; and so long 
as work is of a visibly pecuniary kind and is sagaciously 


184 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


and visibly directed to the acquisition of wealth, the 
disrepute intrinsically attaching to it is greatly offset 
by its meritorious purpose. So much so, indeed, that 
there has even grown up something of a class feeling, 
among the class who have come by their wealth through 
industry and shrewd dealing, to the effect that peaceable 
diligence and thrift are meritorious traits. 

This is “middle-class” sentiment of course. The 
aristocratic contempt for the tradesman and all his 
works has not suffered serious mitigation through all 
this growth of new methods of reputability. The three 
conventionally recognised classes, upper, middle, and 
lower, are all and several pecuniary categories; the upper 
being typically that (aristocratic) class which is pos¬ 
sessed of wealth without having worked or bargained 
for it; while the middle class have come by their holdings 
through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and 
the lower class gets what it has by workmanship. It 
is a gradation of (a) predation, ( b ) business, (c) industry; 
the former being disserviceable and gainful, the second 
gainful, and the third serviceable. And no modern 
civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability 
as not to recognise off-hand that the first category is 
meritorious and the last discreditable, whatever his 
individual prejudices may lead him to think of the second. 
Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without preda¬ 
tory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic 
class loses its pecuniary advantage it becomes ques¬ 
tionable. A poverty-stricken aristocrat is a “decayed 
gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a disin¬ 
genuous figure of speech. 

The transition from the original predatory phase of 


The Technology of the Predatory Culture 185 

* 4 'V . 

the pecuniary culture to the succeeding commercial phase 
signifies the emergence of a middle class in such force as 
presently to recast the working arrangements of the 
cultural scheme and make peaceable business (gainful 
traffic) the ruling interest of the community. With the 
same movement emerges a situation which is progres¬ 
sively more favourable to the intellectual animus required 
for workmanship and an advance in technology. The 
state of the industrial arts advances, and with its ad¬ 
vance the accumulation of wealth is accelerated, the 
gainfulness of business traffic increases, and the middle 
(business) class grows along with it. It is in the conscious 
interest of this class to further the gainfulness of indus¬ 
try, and as this end is correlated with the productive¬ 
ness of industry it is also, though less directly, correlated 
with improvements in technology. 

With the transition from a naively predatory scheme 
to a commercial one, the “competitive system” takes 
the place of the coercive methods previously employed, 
and pecuniary gain becomes the incentive to industry. 
At least superficially, or ephemerally, the workman’s 
income under this pecuniary regime is in some propor¬ 
tion to his product. Hence there results a voluntary 
application to steady work and an inclination to find 
and to employ improvements in the methods and ap¬ 
pliances of industry. At the same time commercial 
conceptions come progressively to supplant conceptions 
of status and personal consequence as the primary and 
most familiar among the habits of thought entailed by 
the routine of daily life. This will be true especially 
for the common man, as contrasted with the aristocratic 
classes, although it is not to be overlooked that the 


186 The Instinct of Workmanship 

standards of propriety imposed on the community by 
the better classes will have a considerably corrective 
effect on the frame of mind of the common man in this 
respect as in others, and so will act to maintain an effec¬ 
tive currency of predatory ideals and preconceptions 
after the economic situation at large has taken on a good 
deal of a commercial complexion. The accountancy of 
price and ownership throws personal prestige and conse¬ 
quence notably less into the foreground than does the 
rating in terms of prowess and gentle birth that charac¬ 
terises the predatory scheme of life. And in proportion 
as such pecuniary accountancy comes to pervade men’s 
relations, correspondingly impersonal terms of rating 
and appreciation will make their way also throughout 
men’s habitual apprehension of external facts, giving 
the whole an increasingly impersonal complexion. So 
far as this effect is had, the facts of observation will lend 
themselves with correspondingly increased facility and 
effect to the purposes of technology. So that the com¬ 
mercial phase of culture should be favourable to advance 
in the industrial arts, at least as regards the immediate 
incidence of its discipline. 


CHAPTER V 

Ownership and the Competitive System 
I. Peaceable Ownership 

The pecuniary system of social organisation that so 
results has grave and lasting consequences for the welfare 
of society. It brings class divergence of material in¬ 
terests, class prerogative and differential hardship, and 
an accentuated class disparity in the consumption of 
goods, involving a very extensive resort to the conspic¬ 
uous waste of goods and services as an evidence of wealth. 
These consequences of the pecuniary economy may be 
interesting enough in themselves, even to the theore¬ 
tician, but they need not be pursued here except in so 
far as they have an appreciable bearing on the com¬ 
munity’s workmanlike efficiency and the further develop¬ 
ment of technology. 1 But the more direct and immediate 
technological consequences of this move from a predatory 
to a peaceable or quasi-peaceable economic system are 
also sufficiently grave—partly favourable to workman¬ 
ship and partly otherwise—and these it is necessary for 
the purposes of this inquiry to follow up in some detail. 

The interest and attention of the two typical pecuniary 

1 For some further analysis of the relation between ownership, earnings 
and the material equipment see Quarterly Journal of Economics , August, 
1908, “On the Nature of Capital;” as also a paper by H. J. Davenport 
in the same Journal for November, 1910, on “Social Productivity versus 
Private Acquisition.” 

187 



18 8 The Instinct of Workmcmship 

classes between whom the affairs of industry now come 
to lie, presently part company and enter on a course of 
progressive differentiation along two divergent lines. 
The workmen, labourers, operatives, technologists,— 
whatever term may best designate that general category 
of human material through which the community’s 
technological proficiency functions directly to an indus¬ 
trial effect,—these have to do with the work, whereby 
they get their livelihood, and their interest as well as 
the discipline of their workday life converges, in effect 
on a technologically competent apprehension of ma¬ 
terial facts. In this respect the free workmen under 
this peaceable regime of property are very differently 
placed from the servile workman of the predatory regime 
of mastery and servitude. The latter has little if any 
interest in the efficiency of the industrial processes in 
which he is engaged, less so the more widely his status 
differs from that of the free workman. His case is anal¬ 
ogous to that of the tenant at will, who has nothing to 
gain from permanent improvement of the land which 
he cultivates. Whereas the free workman is, at least 
immediately and transiently, and particularly in his 
own current apprehension of the matter, quite intimately 
dependent on his own technological proficiency and 
vitally interested in any available technological ex¬ 
pedient that promises to heighten his efficiency. Such 
is particularly the case during the earlier phases of the 
regime of peaceable ownership, so long as the free work¬ 
man is in the typical case working at his own discretion 
and disposes of his own product in a limited market. 
And such continues to be the case, on the whole, under 
the wage system so long as the large-scale production 


Ownership and the Competitive System 189 

and investment have not put an end to the employer’s 
intimate supervision of his employes. Indeed, under 
the driving exigencies of the competitive wage system 
the workmen are somewhat strenuously held to such a 
workmanlike apprehension of things, even though they 
may no longer have the same intimate concern in their 
own current efficiency as in the earlier days of handicraft. 
The severe pressure of competitive wages and large or¬ 
ganisation, it might well be thought, should logically 
offset the slighter attraction which work as such has 
for the hired workman as contrasted with the man 
occupied with his own work. The effect of this regime 
of free labour should logically be, as it apparently has in 
great part been, a close and progressively searching re¬ 
course to the logic of matter-of-fact in all the workmen’s 
habitual thinking, and in all their outlook on matters 
of interest, whether in industry or in the other concerns 
of life that may conceivably be of more capital interest. 

On the other hand the owners under this regime of 
peaceable ownership have to do with the pecuniary 
management, the gainful manipulation of property. In 
the transitional beginnings of this system of peaceable 
ownership and free workmen the owners are in the 
typical case owners of land or similar natural resources; 
but in due course of time there arises a class of owners 
holding property in the material equipment of industry 
and deriving their gains and livelihood from a business¬ 
like management of this property, at the same time that 
the landlords also fall into more businesslike relations 
with their tenants on the one hand and with the indus¬ 
trial community that supplies their wants on the other 
hand. These owners, investors, masters, employers, 


190 The Instinct of Workmanship 

undertakers, businessmen, have to do with the negotia¬ 
tion of advantageous bargains; it is by bargaining that 
their discretionary control of property takes effect, and 
in one way or another their attention centres on the 
quest of profits. The training afforded by these occupa¬ 
tions and requisite to their effectual pursuit runs in 
terms of pecuniary management and insight, pecuniary 
gain, price, price-cost, price-profit and price-loss; and 
these men are held to an ever more exacting recourse to 
the logic of the price system, and so are trained to the 
apprehension of men and things in terms which count 
toward a gainful margin on investments and business 
undertakings; that is to say in terms of the self-regarding 
propensities and sentiments comprised in human nature, 

, and perhaps especially in terms of human infirmity. 

This last point in the characterisation may seem un¬ 
warranted, and may even strike unreflecting persons as 
derogatory. It is, of course, not so intended; and any 
degree of reflection will bring out its simple bearing on 
the facts of business. As is well and obviously known, 
the sole end of business as such is pecuniary gain, gain 
in terms of price. It need not be held, as has sometimes 
been argued, that one businessman’s gain is necessarily 
another’s loss; although that principle was once taken 
for granted, as the foundation of the Mercantilist policies 
of Europe, and is still acted on uncritically by the gen¬ 
erality of statesmen. But it is at any rate true, because 
it is contained in the terms employed, that a successful 
business negotiation is more successful in proportion as 
the party of the second part is less competent to take 
care of his own pecuniary interest, whether through 
native or acquired incapacity for pecuniary discretion 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


191 

or from pecuniary inability to stand out for such terms 
as he otherwise might conceivably exact. A shrewd 
businessman can, notoriously, negotiate advantageous 
terms with an inexperienced minor or a necessitous cus¬ 
tomer or employe. Pecuniary gain is a differential 
gain and business is a negotiation of such differential 
gains; not necessarily a differential of one businessman 
as against or at the cost of another; but more commonly, 
and more typical of the competitive system, it is a dif¬ 
ferential as between the businessman’s outlay and his 
returns,—that is to say, as between the businessman and 
the unbusinesslike generality of persons with whom 
directly or indirectly he deals as customers, employes, 
and the like. For the purposes of such a negotiation of 
differentials the weakness of one party (in the pecuniary 
respect) is as much to the point as the strength of the 
other,—the two being substantially the same fact. The 
discipline of the business occupations should accordingly 
run to the habitual rating of men, things and affairs in 
terms of emulative human nature and of precautionary 
wisdom in respect of pecuniary expediency. Instead of 
workmanlike or technological insight, this discipline con¬ 
duces to worldly wisdom. 1 

But the disparity between the discipline of the 
business occupations and that of industry is by no 
means so sheer as this contrast in their main char¬ 
acteristics would imply, nor do the men engaged in 
these two divergent lines of work differ so widely in 
their habitual outlook on affairs or their insight into 

1 For a more detailed discussion of this disciplinary disparity between 
business and industrial occupations, cf. The Theory of Business Enter - 
prise , ch. iv, viii and ix. 


192 The Instinct of Workmanship 

facts. Such is particularly the case in the earlier and 
simpler phases of the regime, before the specialisation 
of occupations had gone so far as to divide the working 
community in any consistent fashion into the two con¬ 
trasted classes, of businessmen on the one side and work¬ 
men on the other. As this modem regime of peaceable 
ownership and pecuniary organisation has advanced 
and its peculiar features of organisation and workman¬ 
ship have reached a sharper definition, the division be¬ 
tween the two contrasted kinds of endeavour—business 
and workmanship—has grown wider and the disparity 
in the distinctive range of habits engendered by each 
has grown more marked. So that something of a marked 
and pervading contrast should logically be found be¬ 
tween the habitual attitude taken by members of the 
business community on the one hand and that of the 
body of workmen on the other hand; and this contrast 
should, logically, go on increasing with each successive 
move in advance along this line of specialisation of oc¬ 
cupations and “division of labour.” Some such result 
has apparently followed; but neither has the specialisa¬ 
tion been complete and consistent, nor has the resulting 
differentiation in respect of their intellectual and spir¬ 
itual attitude set the two contrasted classes of persons 
apart in so definitive a fashion as a first and elementary 
consideration of the causes at work might lead one to 
infer. 

Businessmen have to do with industry; more or 
less remotely perhaps, but often at near hand, for it is 
out of industry that their business gains come; and they 
are also subject to the routine of living imposed by the 
use of the particular range of industrial appliances and 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


193 


processes available for that use. The workmen on the 
other hand have also to do with pecuniary matters, for 
they are forever in contact with the market in one way 
and another, and it is in pecuniary terms that the liveli¬ 
hood comes to them for which they are set to work. And 
both businessmen and workmen enter on their two di¬ 
vergent lines of training with much the same endow¬ 
ment of propensities and aptitudes. Yet it appears that 
the training in pecuniary wisdom that makes up the 
career of the typical businessman is after all of little 
avail in the way of technological insight or efficiency, 
as witness the ubiquitous mismanagement of industry 
at the hands of businessmen who are, presumably, doing 
their best to enhance the efficiency of the industries 
under their control with a view to the largest net gain 
from the output. 1 If the “efficiency engineers” are to 
be credited, it is probably within the mark to say that 
the net aggregate gains from industry fall short of what 
they might be by some fifty per cent, owing to the trained 
inability of the businessmen in control to appreciate 
and give effect to the visible technological requirements 
of the industries from which they draw their gains. To 
appreciate the kind and degree of this commonplace 
mismanagement of industry it is only necessary to con¬ 
trast the facility, circumspection, shrewd strategy and 
close economy shown by these same businessmen in the 
organisation and management of their pecuniary, fiscal 
and monetary operations, as against the waste of time, 
labour and materials that abounds in the industries under 
their control. But for the workmen likewise, their daily 

1 Cf., e. g., Harrington Emerson, Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and 
Wages , ph. i, jy. 


194 The Instinct of Workmanship 

. V 

work and their insight into its requirements and possi¬ 
bilities are, by more than half, a “ business proposition,” 
a proposition in the pecuniary calculus of how to get the 
most in price for the least return in weight and tale. 

These various considerations, taken crudely in their 
first incidence, would seem to preclude any technological 
advance under this quasi-peaceable regime of business. 
Business principles and pecuniary distinctions rule the 
familiar routine of life, and even the common welfare is 
conceived in terms of price, and so of differential ad¬ 
vantage; and under such a system there should appar¬ 
ently be little chance of the dispassionate pursuit of 
such a non-invidious interest as that of workmanship. 
The prime mover in this cultural scheme appears to be in¬ 
vidious self-aggrandisement, without fear or favour; and 
its goal appears to be the conspicuous waste of goods and 
services. Yet in point of fact the technological advance 
under these modern conditions has been larger and more 
rapid than in any other cultural situation. Therefore 
the circumstances under which these modern gains in 
technology have been made will merit somewhat more 
detailed attention; as also the cultural consequences 
that have followed from this technological advance or 
been conditioned by it. And at the risk of some tedious 
repetition it seems pertinent summarily to recall these 
peculiar circumstances that have conditioned the modern 
culture and have presumably shaped its technological 
output. 

By and large this modern technological era runs its 
course within the frontiers of Occidental civilisation, 
and in the period subsequent to the feudal age. Roughly, 
its centre of diffusion is the region of the North Sea, and 


Ownership and the Competitive System 195 

its placement in point of time is in that period of com¬ 
parative peace spoken of as “modern times.” Such of 
the peoples comprised within this Western culture as 
have continued to be actively occupied with fighting 
during this modern period have had no creative share in 
this technological era, and indeed they have had little 
share of any kind. The broad centre of diffusion of this 
technology coincides in a curious way with that of the 
singularly competent and singularly matter-of-fact neo¬ 
lithic culture of northern Europe; and the racial elements 
that have been engaged in this modern technological 
advance are still substantially the same, and mixed in 
substantially the same proportions, as during that pre¬ 
historic technological era of the lower barbarism or the 
higher savagery. This implies, of course, that the spir¬ 
itual (instinctive) endowment of the peoples that have 
made the modern technological era is still substantially 
the same as was that of their forebears of the Danish 
stone age. 

The peoples that have taken the lead in this cultural 
growth, and more particularly in the technological ad¬ 
vance, have never lived under a full-grown and consist¬ 
ently worked out patriarchal system, nor have they, 
therefore, ever fully assimilated that peculiarly personal 
and arbitrarily authoritative scheme of anthropomorphic 
beliefs that commonly goes with the patriarchal system. 
In the earlier phases of their cultural experience, and 
until recently, they have lived in small communities, 
under more or less of local self-government, and have in 
great part shown some degree of religious scepticism 
and insubordination. They have had some experience 
of the sea and of that impersonal run of phenomena 


ig6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

which the sea offers; which call on those who have 
to do with the sea for patient observation of how such 
impersonal forces work, and which constrain them to 
learn by trial and error how these forces may be turned 
to account. Latterly, in the days of their most pro¬ 
nounced technological advance, these peoples have had 
experience of an economic and industrial system or¬ 
ganised on an unexampled scale, such as to constitute a 
very wide and inclusive industrial community within 
which intercourse has been increasingly easy and effect¬ 
ive. 

These circumstances have determined the range of 
their habituation in its larger features; and these peoples 
have come under the discipline of this situation with a 
spiritual endowment apparently differing in some degree 
from what any other group of peoples has ever brought 
to a similar task. How much of the outcome, cultural 
and technological, is to be set down naively and directly 
to a peculiar temperamental bent in this human raw ma¬ 
terial would be hazardous to conjecture. Something 
seems fairly to be credited to that score. The particular 
mixture of hybrids that goes to make up these peoples, 
and in which the dolicho-blond enters more or less 
ubiquitously, appears to lack a certain degree of subtlety, 
such as seems native to many other peoples that have 
created civilisations of a different complexion,—a sub¬ 
tlety that shows itself in a readiness for intrigue and far¬ 
sighted appreciation of the springs of human nature, 
and which often shows itself also in high-wrought and 
stupendous constructions of anthropomorphic myth and 
theology, religion and magic, as well as in such large 
and fertile systems of creative art as will commonly 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


197 


accompany these anthropomorphic creations. Those 
peoples that are infused with an appreciable blond ad¬ 
mixture have on the other hand, not commonly excelled 
in the farther reaches of the spiritual life, particularly 
not in the refinements of a sustained and finished anthro¬ 
pomorphism. Their best efficiency has rather run to 
those bull-headed deeds of force and those mechanic 
arts that touch closely on the domain of the inorganic 
forces. 

Of such a character is also this modern technological 
era. It is in the mechanic arts dealing with brute matter 
that the modern technology holds over all else, in matter- 
of-fact insight, in the naivete of the questions with which 
its adepts search the facts of observation, and in the 
crudity (anthropomorphically speaking) of the answers 
with which they are content to go back to their work. 
Outside of the mechanic arts this technology must be 
rated lower than second best. In subtlety of craftsman- 
like insight and contrivance or in delicacy of manipula¬ 
tion and adroit use of man’s physical aptitudes the peo¬ 
ples of this Western culture are not now and never have 
been equal to the best. 

Such a characterisation of the modern technology may 
seem too broad and too schematic,—that it overlooks 
features of the case that are sufficiently large and distinc¬ 
tive to call for their recognition even in the most general 
characterisation. So, e. g., in the light of what has been 
noted above in speaking of the domestication of the 
crop plants and animals, the question may well suggest 
itself: Is not the patent success of these modern indus¬ 
trial peoples in the use and improvement of crops and 
cattle to be accepted as evidence of a genial anthropo- 


198 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


morphic bent, of the same kind and degree as took effect 
in the original domestication of plants and animals? 
For some two hundred years past, it is true, very sub¬ 
stantial advances have been made in tillage and breeding, 
and this is at the same time the peculiar domain in which 
the anthropomorphic savages of the stone age once 
achieved those things which have made civilisation 
physically possible; but the modern gains made in these 
lines have, in the main if not altogether, been techno¬ 
logically of the same mechanistic character as the rest 
of the modern advance in the industrial arts, with little 
help or hindrance due to any such anthropomorphic bias 
as guided the savage ancients. It is rather by virtue of 
their having come competently to apprehend these facts 
of animate nature in substantially inanimate terms, 
mechanistic and chemical terms, that the modern techno¬ 
logical adepts in tillage and cattle-breeding have success¬ 
fully carried this line of workmanship forward at a rate 
and with an effect not approached before. The live¬ 
stock expert is soberly learning by trial and error what 
to attempt and how to go about it in his breeding experi¬ 
ments, and he deals as callously as any mechanical en¬ 
gineer with the chemistry of stock foods and the use 
and abuse of ferments, germs and enzymes. The soil 
specialist talks, thinks and acts in terms of salts, acids, 
alkalies, stratifications, 200-mesh siftings, and nitrogen¬ 
fixing organisms. The crop-plant expert looks to hand¬ 
made cross-fertilisation and to the Mendelian calculus 
of hybridisation, with no more imputation of anthropo¬ 
morphic traits than the metallurgist who analyses fuels 
and fluxes, mixes ores, and with goggled eye scrutinises 
the shifting tints of the incandescent gases in the open 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


199 


hearth. It is from such facts so construed that modern 
technology is made up, and it is by such channels that 
the sense of workmanship has gone to the making of it. 

So the question recurs, How has it come about that 
this pecuniary culture—with its institutions drawn in 
terms of differential advantage and moved by senti¬ 
ments that converge on emulative gain and the invi¬ 
diously conspicuous waste of goods—has yet furthered 
the growth of such a technology, even permissively? In 
its direct incidence, the discipline of this pecuniary cul¬ 
ture is doubtless inimical to any advance in workman¬ 
like insight or any matter-of-fact apprehension and use 
of objective phenomena. It is a civilisation whose sub¬ 
stantial core is of a subjective kind, in the narrowly sub¬ 
jective, personal, individualistic sense given by the self- 
regarding sentiments of emulous rivalry. 1 But when all 
is said it is after all a peaceable culture, on the whole; 
and indeed the rules of the business game of profit and 
loss, forfeit and sequestration, require it to be so. It 
has at least that much, and perhaps much else, in com¬ 
mon with the great technological era of the north- 
European neolithic age. The discipline to which its 
peoples are subject may be exacting enough, and its 
exactions may run to worldly wisdom rather than to 
matter-of-fact; but its invidious distinctions run in 
terms of price, that is to say in terms of an objective, 
impersonal money unit, in the last resort a metallic 

1 Such is tacitly assumed to be the nature of modern economic life in 
the current theoretical formulations of the economists, who make the 
theory of exchange value the central and controlling doctrine in their 
theoretical systems, and who w r ith easy conviction trace this value back 
to an individualistic ground in the doctrines of differential utility— 
‘‘marginal utility,” 



200 The Instinct of Workmanship 

V 

weight; and the traffic of daily life under this price system 
affords an unremitting exercise in the exact science of 
making change, large and small. Even the daydreams 
of the pecuniary day-dreamer take shape as a calculus of 
profit and loss computed in standard units of an im¬ 
personal magnitude, even though the magnitude of these 
standard units may on analysis prove to be of a largely 
putative character. The imputation under the price 
system is of an impersonal kind. In the current appre¬ 
hension of the pecuniary devotee these magnitudes are 
wholly objective, so that in effect the training that comes 
of busying himself with them is after all a training in the 
accurate appreciation of brute fact. 

At the same time, the instinct of workmanship, being 
not an acquired trait, has not been got rid of by disuse; 
and when the occasion offers, under the relatively tran¬ 
quil conditions of this peaceable or quasi-peaceable pe¬ 
cuniary regime, the ancient proclivity asserts itself in 
its ancient force, uneager and asthenic perhaps, but 
pervasive and resilient. And when this instinct works 
out through the Boeotic genius of the north-European 
hybrid there is a good chance that the outcome of such 
observation and reflection will fall into terms of matter- 
of-fact, of such close-shorn naivete, indeed, as to afford 
very passable material for the material sciences and the 
machine technology. 

So also, the ancient and time-worn civil institutions 
of the north-European peoples have apparently not been 
of the high-wrought invidious character that comes of 
long and strenuous training in the practices and ideals 
of the patriarchal system; nor are their prevailing reli¬ 
gious conceits extremely drastic, theatrical or cere- 


Ownership and the Competitive System 201 

monious, as compared with what is to be found in the 
cults of the great dynastic civilisations of the East. On 
the whole, it is only through the Middle Ages that these 
peoples have been subject to the rigorous servile dis¬ 
cipline that characterises a dynastic despotism, secular 
or religious; and much of the ancient, pagan and pre¬ 
historic preconceptions on civil and religious matters 
appears to have stood over in the habits of thought of 
the common people even through that interval of sub¬ 
mergence under aristocratic and patriarchal rule.. In 
the same connection it may be remarked that the blond- 
hybrid peoples of Christendom were the last to accept 
the patriarchal mythology of the Semites and have also 
been the first and readiest to shuffle out of it in the sequel; 
which suggests the inference that they have never fully 
assimilated its spirit; perhaps for lack of a sufficiently 
strict and protracted discipline in its ways and ideals, 
perhaps for lack of a suitable temperamental ground. 

There is, indeed, a curiously pervasive concomitance, 
in point of time, place, and race, between the modern 
machine technology, the material sciences, religious 
scepticism, and that spirit of insubordination that makes 
the substance of what are called free or popular institu¬ 
tions. On none of these heads is the concomitance so 
close or consistent as to warrant the conclusion that race 
and topography alone have made this modern cultural 
outcome. The exceptions and side issues are too broad 
and too numerous for that; but it is after all a con¬ 
comitance of such breadth and scope that it can also not 4 
be overlooked. 


The course of mutations that has brought on this 


202 


The Instinct of Workmanship 1 


modern technological episode may be conceived to have 
run somewhat in the following manner. For lack of 
sufficient training in predatory habits of thought (as 
shown, e. g., in the incomplete patriarchalism of the 
north-Europeans) the predatory culture failed to reach 
what may be called a normal maturity in the feudal sys¬ 
tem of Europe, particularly in the North and West, 
where the blond admixture is stronger; by “normal” 
being here intended that sequence of growth, institution¬ 
alisation, and decay shown typically by the great dynas¬ 
tic civilisations erected by Semitic invaders in the East. 
In the full-charged predatory culture, in its earlier phases, 
there appear typically to be present two somewhat 
divergent economic principles (habits of thought) both 
of which have something of an institutional force: ( a ) The 
warrant of seizure by prowess, 1 which commonly comes 
to vest in the dynastic head in case a despotic state is 
established; and ( h ) the prescriptive tenure of whatever 
one has acquired. These two institutional factors are 
at variance, and according as one or the other of the two 
finally takes precedence and rules out or masters its 
rival postulate, the predatory culture continues on lines 
of coercive exploitation, as in these Asiatic monarchies; 
or it passes into the quasi-peaceable phase marked by 
secure prescriptive tenure of property and a settled no¬ 
bility, and presently into a commercialised industrial 
situation. Either line of development may, of course, 

1 Apart from scattered and progressively inconsequential manifesta¬ 
tions of this canon of pecuniary equity in the European community at 
large, there occurs a quaint and well-defined application of it in the prac¬ 
tice of “ holmgangr” in late pagan and early Christian times among the 
Scandinavian peoples. The “wager of battle” is probably of the same 
derivation, at least in part. 


Ownership and the Competitive System 203 

be broken off without having reached a consumma¬ 
tion. 

Within the region of the Western Civilisation, both 
in north Europe and repeatedly in the ^Egean, the 
course of events has fallen out in the line of the latter 
alternative; the growth of institutions has shifted from 
the footing of prowess to that of prescriptive ownership. 
So soon as this shift has securely been made, the develop¬ 
ment of trade, industry and a technological system has 
come into the foreground, and these habitual interests 
have then reacted on the character of the institutions in 
force, thereby accelerating the growth of conditions 
favourable to their own further advance. There is, of 
course, no marked point of conjuncture in the cultural se¬ 
quence at which this transition may definitely be said to 
have been effected, but in a general way it may be held 
that the point of transition has been passed so soon as 
the current political and economic speculations uncriti¬ 
cally give precedence to the “commonweal” as against 
the fiscal interests of the crown or the “state,” whereby 
the crown and its officers come, in theory and public pro¬ 
nouncement, to be rated as guardians of the community’s 
material welfare rather than autocratic exploiters of 
the community’s productive capacity. Roughly from 
the same period there will duly set in something of an 
acceleration in rate of improvement in the state of the 
mechanic arts. This movement seems plainly to come 
on the initiative of the lower or industrial classes and to 
be carried by their genius, rather than by that of the 
ruling classes, whether secular or spiritual. It shows 
itself, typically, in a growth of handicraft and petty 
trade. 


204 The Instinct of Workmanship 

v 

So the sense of workmanship and its associated senti¬ 
ments again come, by insensible degrees, to take the first 
place among the factors that determine the run of habitu¬ 
ation and therefore the character of the resulting cul¬ 
ture,—so making the transition from barbarism to 
civilisation, in the narrower sense of the term; which is 
accordingly to be characterised, in contrast with the 
predatory barbarian culture, as a qualified or mitigated 
(sophisticated) return to the spirit of savagery, or at 
least as a spiritual reversion looking in that direction, 
though by no means abruptly reaching the savage plane. 
The new phase has this in common with the typical sav¬ 
age culture that workmanship rather than prowess again 
becomes the chief or primary norm of habituation, and 
therefore of the growth of institutions; and that there 
results, therefore, a peaceable bent in the ideals and en¬ 
deavours of the community. But it is workmanship com¬ 
bined and compounded with ownership; that is to say 
workmanship coupled with an invidious emulation and 
consequently with a system of institutions embodying a 
range of prescriptive differential benefits. 

II. The Competitive System 

Dominated by the tradition handed down from the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, current economic 
theory has habitually made much of accumulated goods 
as the prime requisite of industry. In industrial en¬ 
terprise as it was then carried on the prevailing unit of 
organisation was the private firm, with partnership con¬ 
cerns making up a secondary and less commonplace ele¬ 
ment in the business community. Ordinarily and typic- 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


205 


ally these private firms and partnerships owned a certain 
material equipment employed in industry, and they took 
the initiative in industrial enterprise on the ground of 
this ownership; hiring the workmen, buying materials 
and supplies, and selling the products of the establish¬ 
ment. Credit relations, such as go to the creation and 
conduct of a modern corporation, were still of secondary 
consequence, being resorted to rather as an expedient 
in emergencies than as the initial move and the substan¬ 
tial ground of business organisation; the measure of the 
concern’s magnitude and consequence was still (typic¬ 
ally) its unencumbered ownership of the material equip¬ 
ment, the size of the plant and the numbers of its hired 
workmen. It follows by easy consequence that in the 
practical business conceptions of that time the equip¬ 
ment of material means, which embodies the concern’s 
assets and affords the ground of its initiative and its 
rating in the business community, should commonly be 
rated as the prime mover in industry and the chief pro¬ 
ductive factor. So, also, the theoretical speculation 
that drew on that business traffic for its working con¬ 
cepts came unavoidably to accept these tangible assets, 
the community’s material equipment,—implements, live¬ 
stock, raw materials, means of subsistence,—as the prime 
agency in the community’s economic life. As is true 
for the working conceptions and principles of industrial 
business, so also in the theoretical formulations of the 
economists, the community’s immaterial equipment of 
technological proficiency is taken for granted as a cir¬ 
cumstance of the environment conditioning the com¬ 
munity’s economic life,—the state of the industrial arts 
and the current workmanlike aptitudes and efficiency. 


20G The Instinct of Workmanship 

L 

As the phrase runs, “ given the state of the industrial 
arts.” 

This is good, homely, traditional common sense; it 
reflects the habitual practical run of affairs in the indus¬ 
trial community of that recent past. Such was the 
attitude of practical men toward industrial matters at 
the time when the current economic situation took its 
rise. But such a conception is no longer so true to the 
practical exigencies of the immediate present, nor do the 
men of affairs to-day habitually see these matters in 
just this light; although the principles of the law that 
govern industrial enterprise still continue to embody 
these time-worn conceptions, to which the economists 
also continue to yield allegiance. Like other elements 
of habitual knowledge this conception of tilings is drawn 
from past experience—chiefly from a past not too remote 
for ready comprehension—and it carries over the frame 
of mind out of which it arose. 

In the earlier days of the machine industry, then,— 
say, in the closing quarter of the eighteenth century,— 
the conduct of industrial affairs was in the hands of 
business men who owned the material equipment and 
who directed the use of this equipment and turned it to 
account for their own gain, on the prescriptive ground 
of such ownership. Discretion and initiative vested in 
the capitalist-employer, who at that time (typically) 
combined ownership of the plant with a somewhat im¬ 
mediate supervision and control of the industrial pro¬ 
cesses. The directive control of industry, covering both 
the volume and the character of the procesess and out¬ 
put, was in the typical case directly bound up with 
the ownership of the material equipment as such,— as 


Ownership and the Competitive System 207 

tangible assets, not as corporation stock-holdings. Since 
then changes have come over the business situation, 
particularly through an extensive recourse to credit, 
such that this time-worn conception will no longer answer 
the run of current business practice, particularly not as 
touches that large-scale enterprise that now rules indus¬ 
trial affairs and that is currently accepted as the type 
of modern business enterprise. 

Among the assumptions of a hundred years ago was 
the premise, self-evident to that generation of thought¬ 
ful men, that the phase of commercialised economic 
life then prevailing was the immutably normal order of 
things. And the assumptions surrounding that precon¬ 
ception were good and competent for a formulation of 
economic theory that takes such an institutional situa¬ 
tion for granted and assumes it to be unchanging, or to 
be a terminus ad quern. But for anything like a genetic 
account of economic life, early or late, capitalistic or 
otherwise, such assumptions and the theoretical proposi¬ 
tions and analyses that follow from them are defective 
in that they take for granted what requires to be ac¬ 
counted for. Theoretical speculation that presupposes 
the (somewhat old-fashioned) institutions formerly gov¬ 
erning ownership and business traffic, and assumes them 
to have the immutable character and indefeasible force 
de facto which is assigned them de jure, and that likewise 
assumes as immutable a passing phase in the “ state of 
the industrial arts,” may serve passably for a theory of 
how business affairs should properly arrange themselves 
to fit the conditions so assumed; and such, indeed, has 
commonly been the character of theoretical formulations 
touching industry and business. And as should fairly 


208 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


be expected, in the speculations of the economists, 
these theoretical formulations have also commonly been 
accompanied by a parallel line of remedial advice 
designed to show what preventive measures should 
be applied to prevent the run of business practice 
from doing violence to these assumed conditions that 
are held to be immutably normal and indefeasibly 
right. 

Now, since in the received theories the accumulated 
“productive goods” are conceived to be the most con¬ 
sequential factor in industry, and therefore in the 
community’s material welfare and in the fortunes of 
individuals, it logically follows that the discretionary 
ownership of them has come to be accounted the most 
important relation in which men may stand to the pro¬ 
duction of wealth and to the community’s livelihood; 
and the pecuniary transactions whereby this ownership 
is arranged, manipulated and redistributed are held to be 
industrially the most productive of all human activities. 
It is only during the nineteenth century that this doc¬ 
trine of pecuniary productivity has been worked out 
into finished shape and has found secure lodgment in 
the systematic structure of economic theory—in the 
current theory of “the Function of the Entrepreneur;” 1 
but it is also only during this period that business enter¬ 
prise (pecuniary management) has come to dominate the 
economic situation in a substantially unmitigated degree, 
so that the material fortunes of the community have 
come to depend on these pecuniary negotiations into 
which its “captains of industry” enter for their own 

1 Cf. Frederic Barnard Hawley, Enterprise and the Productive Process , 
for an extreme, mature and consistent development of this tenet. 


Ownership and the Competitive System 209 

t «h» 

gain. 1 In the sense that no other line of activity stands 
in anything like an equally decisive relation of initiative 
or discretion to the industrial process, or bears with a 
like weight on the material welfare of the community, 
these business negotiations in ownership are unques¬ 
tionably the prime factor in modern industry. But that 
such is the case is due to the peculiar institutions of 
modern times and to the peculiar current state of the 
industrial arts; and the former of these peculiar circum¬ 
stances is conditioned by the latter. 

It is not practicable to assign a hard and fast date 
from which this modern era began, with its peculiar 
scheme of economic life and the economic conceptions 
that characterise it. The date will vary from one coun¬ 
try to another, and even from one industrial class to 
another within the same country. But it can be said 
that historically the modern era begins with the rise of 
handicraft; it is along the line of growth marked out by 
the development of handicraft that the modem tech¬ 
nology has emerged, together with that industrial or¬ 
ganisation and those pecuniary conceptions of economic 
efficiency and serviceability that have gradually come 
to their current state of maturity on the ground afforded 
by this technology. What historically lies back of the 
era of handicraft is not of a piece with the economic situa¬ 
tion of modern times; nor is it characteristic of the 
Western civilisation, as contrasted with the agricultural 
and predatory civilisations of antiquity. 

1 See The Theory of Business Enterprise , ch. iv, vi, vii, for a more de¬ 
tailed discussion of this business traffic and the working principles which 
govern it. See also H. J. Davenport, The Economics of Enterprise (New 
York, 1913). 


2io The Instinct of Workmanship 

4 , 

As indicated in an earlier chapter, in speaking of the 
decay of the predatory (feudalistic) regime and its servile 
agricultural organisation of industry, when peace and 
order supervene the instinct of workmanship by insen¬ 
sible degrees and in an uncertain measure supplants the 
invidious self-regarding sentiments that actuate the life 
of prowess and servility characteristic of that culture; 
so that workmanship comes again into the foreground 
among the instinctive propensities that shape the com¬ 
munity’s habitual interest and so bend the course of its 
institutional growth and determine the bias of its com¬ 
mon sense. 

The habitual outlook and the bias given by the handi¬ 
craft system are of a twofold character—technological 
and pecuniary. The craftsman was an artificer engaged 
in mechanical operations, working with tools of which 
he had the mastery, and employing mechanical processes 
the mysteries of which were familiar to his everyday 
habits of thought; but from the beginning of the era of 
handicraft and throughout his industrial life he w T as 
also more or less of a trader. He stood in close relation 
with some form of market, and his proficiency as a crafts¬ 
man was brought to a daily practical test in the sale of 
his wares or services, no less than in the workmanlike 
fashioning of them. Also, the price as well as the work¬ 
manlike quality of the goods presently became subject 
of regulation under the rules of the crafts; and the petty 
trade which grew up as an occupation accessory to the 
handicraft industry was itself organised on lines analo¬ 
gous to the crafts proper and was regulated by similar 
principles; the trader’s work being accounted serviceable, 
or productive, in the same general sense as that of any 


Ownership and the Competitive System 211 

other craftsman and being recognised as equitably en¬ 
titling those who pursued it to a fair livelihood. 

The handicraft system was an organised and regulated 
system of workmanship and self-help; and under the 
conditions imposed by its technology proficiency in the 
latter respect was no less indispensable and no less to the 
purpose than in the former. Both counted equally and 
in combination toward the successful working of the 
system, which is a practicable plan of economic life only 
so long as the craftsmen combine both of these capacities 
in good force and only so long as the technological exi¬ 
gencies admit the exercise of both in conjunction. The 
system broke down so soon as the state of the industrial 
arts no longer enabled the workmen to acquire the neces¬ 
sary technological proficiency and do the required work 
at the same time that they each and several were able 
to oversee and pursue their individual pecuniary in¬ 
terests. With the coming on of a wider and more exten¬ 
sively differentiated technological scheme, and with 
wider and remoter market relations, due in the main to 
increased facilities of transportation, these necessary 
conditions of a practicable handicraft economy gradually 
failed, and the practice of industrial investments and 
the larger commerce then gradually supplanted it. 

The discipline of everyday life under the handicraft 
economy was a discipline in pecuniary self-help as well 
as in workmanship. In the popular ideal as well as in 
point of practical fact the complete craftsman stood 
shrewdly on his individual proficiency in maintaining 
his own pecuniary advantage, as well as on his trained 
workmanship; and the gilds were organised to maintain 
the craft’s advantages in the market, as well as to regu- 


in The Instinct of Workmanship 

late the quality of the output. The craft rules govern¬ 
ing the quality of the output of goods were in the main 
enforced with a view to the maintenance of price, and 
so with a view to securing an adequate livelihood for the 
craftsmen. Efficiency in the crafts came in this way 
presently to be counted very much as the modern “effi¬ 
ciency engineers” would count it,—proximately in terms 
of mechanical performance, ultimately in terms of price, 
and more particularly in terms of net gain. So that the 
habits of life ingrained in the gildsman, and in the com¬ 
munity at large where the gild system prevailed, com¬ 
prised as a main fact a meticulous regard for details of 
ownership and for pecuniary claims and obligations. It 
is out of this insistent, pervasive, and minutely concrete 
discipline in the practice and logic of pecuniary detail 
that there have arisen those “natural rights” of property 
and those “business principles” that have been taken 
over by the later era of the machine industry and capital¬ 
istic investment. 

The rules of the gild, as well as the larger legislative 
provisions that had to do with gild regulations, were 
avowedly drawn with a view to securing the gildsman in 
a fair customary livelihood, and the measures logically 
adopted to this end were designed to secure him in the 
enjoyment and disposal of the returns of his work as 
well as in his right to pursue his trade within the rules 
laid down for the collective welfare by the gild. With 
due training in this logic of the handicraft system it be¬ 
came a plain matter of common sense that the crafts¬ 
man should equitably be entitled to whatever he can 
get for his work under the conventionally settled rules 
of the trade, and should be free to make the most of his 


Ownership and the Competitive Sytem 


213 


capacities in all that pertains to his pursuit of a liveli¬ 
hood; and the like principles (habits of thought) apply 
to the traffic of the petty trade; which, being presently 
interpreted in terms of contract and investment, has 
come to mean the right to do business and to enjoy and 
dispose of the returns from all bargains made in due 
form. 

Presently, as the technological situation gradually 
changed its character through extensions and specialisa¬ 
tion in appliances and processes—perhaps especially 
through changes in the means of communication and 
in the density of population—the handicraft system with 
its petty trade outgrew itself and broke down in a new 
phase of the pecuniary culture. The increasingly wide 
differentiation between workmanship and salesmanship 
grew into a “division of labour” between industry and 
business, between industrial and pecuniary occupations — 
a disjunction of ownership and its peculiar cares, privi¬ 
leges and proficiency from workmanship. By this divi¬ 
sion of labour, or divergence of function, a fraction of the 
community came to specialise in ownership and pecun¬ 
iary traffic, and so came to constitute a business com¬ 
munity occupied with pecuniary affairs, running along 
beside the industrial community proper, with a develop¬ 
ment of practices and usages peculiar to its own needs 
and bearing only indirectly on the further development 
of the industrial system or on the state of the industrial 
arts. 

Master-workmen with means would employ other 
workmen without means, and might or might not them¬ 
selves continue to work at the trade. Petty traders or 
hucksters, nominally members of some craft gild, would 


214 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


grow wealthy with the increasing volume of traffic and 
would organise a more and more extensive household 
(sweatshop) industry to meet the increasing demands 
of their market; or they might become jobbers, carry 
on more far-reaching trade operations over a longer term, 
withdraw more distantly from the actual work of the 
craft, and in the course of a generation or two (as, e. g., 
the Fuggers) would grow into merchant princes and 
financiers who maintained but a remote and impersonal 
relation to the crafts. Or, again, the associated merch¬ 
ants (as, e. g., those of the Hansa) would establish depots 
and agents, “factories,” that would gradually assemble 
something of a working force of craftsmen to sort, ware¬ 
house and finish the products which they handled, at 
the same time that they would exercise an increasingly 
close and extensive oversight of the industries from 
which these products were derived; until these depots, 
under the management of the factors, in some cases 
grew into factories in somewhat the modern acceptance 
of the term. In one way and another this trading or 
huckstering traffic, which had been intimately associated 
with the handicraft industry and gild life, branched off 
in the course of time as the industries advanced to a 
larger scale and a more extensive specialisation; and this 
increasing “division of labour” between workmanship 
and salesmanship led presently to such a segregation of 
the traders out of the body of craftsmen as to give rise 
to a business community devoted to pecuniary manage¬ 
ment alone. 

But the principles on which the new and larger business 
was conducted were the same as those on which the 
earlier petty trade had been carried on, and therefore the 


Ownership and the Competitive System 215 

same in point of derivation and tenor as had been worked 
out by long experience within the handicraft system 
proper. Business traffic was an outgrowth of the handi¬ 
craft system, and it was in as secure a position in respect 
of legitimacy and legal and customary guaranty as the 
industrial system from which its principles were derived 
and from which its gains were drawn. 

The source from which the new line of businessmen 
drew the accumulations of wealth by force of which 
they were enabled to do business is somewhat in dis¬ 
pute; but however interesting a question that may 
be in its own right, it does not particularly concern 
the present inquiry, and the like is true for the still 
more interesting and spectacular phenomena that marked 
the growth and decline of that early business era that 
ran its course within the life-history of the handicraft 
system. 1 Throughout that great period of business 
activity on the continent of Europe that gathered head 
in the sixteenth century and that closed in decay and 
collapse in the seventeenth, the principles (habits of 
thought) which underlay, authenticated and animated 
the business community and its pecuniary traffic con¬ 
tinued to be much the same as animated the body of 
craftsmen in their pecuniary relations from the begin¬ 
ning of the era of handicraft to its close. Such, in its 
turn, was also the case with the later business era that 
set in with the great industrial advance of England in 
the Eighteenth Century, and such continued to be the 
case through the greater part of its life-history in the 
Nineteenth Century. Of the latterday and latest de- 

1 Cf., e. g., Ehrenberg, Das ZeUdtter der Fugger; Sombart, Dcr Moderne 
KapitalismuSj bk. i. 


2i 6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

velopments in business practice and principles the like 
cannot unhesitatingly be said, but this too is a matter 
that does not immediately concern the inquiry at this 
point. But the principles of the new and larger business 
were the same as had been slowly worked out under the 
system of petty trade. These business principles have 
proved to be very tenacious and stable, even in the face 
of apparently adverse technological circumstances, com¬ 
ing as they do out of a long and rigorous habituation of 
very wide sweep and having acquired the authenticity 
due to formal recognition in legal decisions and to the 
painstaking definition given them in the course of a 
protracted and exacting struggle against the institu¬ 
tional remnants of the feudal system. These circum¬ 
stances attending the genesis and growth of modern 
business principles have led to their being formulated 
in a well-defined conceptual scheme of customary right 
and also to their embodiment in statutory form. To 
this, perhaps, they owe much of their tenacious resistance 
to latterday exigencies that have tended to modify or 
abrogate them. In their elements, of course, these 
business principles are even older than the era of handi¬ 
craft, being substantially of the same nature as that 
sentimental impulse to self-aggrandisement that lies at 
the root of the predatory culture and so makes the sub¬ 
stantial core of all pecuniary civilisations. 

The distinguishing mark of any business era, as con¬ 
trasted with the handicraft economy, is the supreme 
dominance of pecuniary principles, both as standards 
of efficiency and as canons of conduct. In such a busi¬ 
nesslike community efficiency is rated in terms of pe¬ 
cuniary gain; and in so far as business principles rule, 


Ownership and the Competitive System 217 

efficiency in any other direction than business traffic 
can claim recognition only in the measure in which it 
may be reduced to terms of pecuniary gain. Workman¬ 
ship, therefore, comes to be rated in terms of salesman¬ 
ship. And the canons of workmanship, and even of 
technological efficiency, fall more and more into pe¬ 
cuniary lines and allow pecuniary tests to decide on 
points of serviceability. 

The instinct of workmanship is accordingly contami¬ 
nated with ideals of self-aggrandisement and the canons 
of invidious emulation, so that even the serviceability 
of any given action or policy for the common good comes 
to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain which such 
conduct will bring to its author. Any pecuniary strate¬ 
gist—“captain of industry”—who manages to engross 
appreciably more than an even share of the community’s 
wealth is therefore likely to be rated as a benefactor of 
the community at large and an exemplar of the social 
virtues; whereas the man who works and does not man¬ 
age to divert something more from the aggregate product 
to his own use than what one man’s work may contribute 
to it is visited not only with dispraise for having fallen 
short of a decent measure of efficiency but also with 
moral reprobation for shiftlessness and wasted oppor¬ 
tunities. So also, to the current common sense in a 
community trained to pecuniary rather than to work¬ 
manlike discrimination between articles of use, those 
articles which serve their material use in a conspicuously 
wasteful manner commend themselves as more service¬ 
able, nobler and more beautiful than such goods as do 
not embody such a margin of waste. 1 

1 Cf. The Theory of the Leisure Class , cb. iv, v, vi. 


2l8 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


Under this system of business principles, in one way 
and another, the sense of workmanship is contaminated 
in all its ramifications by preconceptions of pecuniary 
merit and invidious distinction. But what is here im¬ 
mediately in question is its deflection into the channels 
of gainful business, together with the more obvious 
consequences that follow directly from the substitution 
of differential gain in the place of material serviceability 
as the end to which the instinctive propensity of work¬ 
manship so comes to drive men’s ideals and efforts under 
the discipline of the pecuniary culture. 

For the purposes of a genetic inquiry into this modern 
business situation and its bearing on the sense of work¬ 
manship and on the technological phenomena in which 
that instinct comes to an expression, it is necessary sum¬ 
marily to recall certain current facts pertinent to the 
case: (a) It is a competitive system; that is to say it is a 
system of pecuniary rivalry and contention which pro¬ 
ceeds on stable institutions of property and contract, 
under conditions of peace and order. ( b ) It is a price 
system, i. e., the competition runs in terms of money, 
and the money unit is the standard measure of efficiency 
and achievement; hence competition and efficiency are 
subject to a rigorous accountancy in terms of a (puta¬ 
tively) stable money unit, which is in all business traffic 
assumed to be invariable. ( c ) Technologically this situa¬ 
tion is dominated by the mechanical industries; so much 
so that even the arts of husbandry have latterly taken 
on much of the character of the mechanic arts. Hence a 
somewhat thoroughgoing standardisation of processes 
and products in mechanical terms; which for business 


Ownership and the Competitive System 219 

purposes has with a fair degree of success been made 
convertible into terms of price, and so made subject to 
accountancy in terms of price, (d) Hence consumption 
is also standardised, proximately in mechanical terms 
of consumable products but finally, through the mech¬ 
anism of the market, in terms of price, and like other 
price phenomena consumption also is competitively 
subject to and enforced by the like accountancy in terms 
of the money unit, (e) The typical industries, which 
set the pace for productive work, for competitive gains, 
and through the standard rates of gain ultimately also 
for competitive consumption, are industries carried on 
on a large scale; that is to say they are such as to require 
a large material equipment, a wide recourse to tech¬ 
nological insight and proficiency, and a large draught 
on the material resources of the community. (/) This 
material equipment—industrial plant and natural re¬ 
sources—it held in private ownership, with negligible 
exceptions; the noteworthy exceptions to this rule, as 
e. g., harbours, highways, and the like, serving chiefly as 
accessory means of industry and so come in chiefly as a 
gratuitous supplement to the industrial equipment held 
in private ownership and used for competitive gain. 
(g) Technological knowledge and proficiency is in the 
main held and transmitted pervasively by the com¬ 
munity at large, but it is also held in part—more ob¬ 
viously because exceptionally—by specially trained 
classes and individual workmen. Relatively little, in 
effect a negligible proportion, of this technological knowl¬ 
edge and skill is in any special sense held by the owners 
of the industrial equipment, more particularly not by the 
owners of the typical large-scale industries. That is to 


220 The Instinct of Workmanship 

say, the technologically proficient workmen do not in 
the typical case own or control any appreciable propor¬ 
tion of the material equipment or of the natural resources 
to which this technological knowledge and skill applies 
and in the use of which it takes effect, {h) It results 
that the owners of this large material equipment, in¬ 
cluding the natural resources, have a discretionary con¬ 
trol of the technological proficiency of the community 
at large, as well as of those special lines of insight and 
skill that are vested in those specially trained expert 
men in whom a specialised proficiency is added to the 
general proficiency that is diffused through the com¬ 
munity at large, (i) In effect, therefore, the owners of 
the necessary material equipment own also the working 
capacity of the community and the usufruct of the state 
of the industrial arts. Except for their effective owner¬ 
ship of these elements of productive efficiency their 
ownership of the material equipment of industry would 
be of no effect. But the usufruct of this productive 
capacity of the community and its trained workmen 
vests in the owners of the material equipment only with 
the contingent qualification that if the community 
does this work it must be allowed a livelihood, whereby 
the gross returns that go in the first instance to these 
owners suffer abatement by that much. This required 
livelihood is adjusted to a conventional standard of liv¬ 
ing which, under the current circumstances of pecun¬ 
iary emulation, is in great part—perhaps chiefly—a 
standardised schedule of conspicuous waste. 

In what has just been said above, the view is implied 
that the owners of the material means, who are in great 
part also the employers of workmen and are sentimentally 


Ownership and the Competitive System 221 

spoken of as “captains of industry/’ have, in effect and 
commonly, but a relatively loose grasp of the technologi¬ 
cal facts, possibilities, and requirements of modem in¬ 
dustry, and that by virtue of their business training 
they are able to make but a scant and uncertain use of 
such loose ideas as they have on these heads. To anyone 
imbued with the commonplaces of current economic 
theory it may seem that exception should dutifully be 
taken to this view, as being an understatement of the 
businessmen’s technological merits. In current theoret¬ 
ical formulations the businessman is discussed under 
the caption of “entrepreneur,” “undertaker,” etc., and 
his gains are spoken of as “wages of superintendence,” 
“wages of management,” and the like. He is conceived 
as an expert workman in charge of the works, a superior 
foreman of the shop, and his gains are accounted a re¬ 
muneration for his creative contribution to the process 
of production, due to his superior insight and initiative in 
technological matters. This conception of the business¬ 
man and his relation to industry has stood over from an 
earlier period, the period of the small-scale industry 
of handicraft and petty trade, when it still was true that 
the owner-employer, in the typical case, kept a personal 
oversight of his workmen and their work, and so filled 
the place of master-workman as well as that of buyer 
and seller of materials and finished goods. And such a 
characterisation of the businessman and his work will 
still hold true in the modern situation in so far as he 
still is occupied with industry conducted on the same 
small scale and continues to fill the place of a foreman of 
the shop. But under current conditions—the conditions 
of the past half century—and more particularly under 


222 The Instinct of Workmanship 

the conditions of that large-scale industry that is cur¬ 
rently accounted the type of modern industry, the busi¬ 
nessman has ceased to be foreman of the shop, and his 
surveillance of industry has ceased effectually to com¬ 
prise a technological management of its details; and in 
corresponding measure this traditional theoretical con¬ 
ception of the businessman has ceased to apply. 

The view here spoken for, that the modern business¬ 
man is necessarily out of effectual touch with the affairs 
of technology as such and incompetent to exercise an 
effectual surveillance of the processes of industry, is not 
a matter of bias or of vague opinion; it has in fact be¬ 
come a matter of statistical demonstration. Even a 
cursory survey of the current achievements of these 
great modern industries as managed by businessmen, 
taken in contrast with the opportunities offered them, 
should convince anyone of the technological unfitness of 
this business management of industry. Indeed, the 
captains of industry have themselves latterly begun to 
recognise their own inefficiency in this respect, and even 
to appreciate that a businessman’s management of in¬ 
dustrial processes is not good even for the business pur¬ 
pose—the net pecuniary gain. And it is all the more 
ineffectual for the purposes of workmanship as distinct 
from the businessmen’s gains. So, a professional class 
of “ efficiency engineers” is coming into action, whose 
duty it is to take invoice of the preventable wastes and 
inefficiencies due to the business management of in¬ 
dustry and to present the case in such concrete and ob¬ 
vious terms of price and percentage as the businessmen 
in charge will be able to comprehend. These men, in a 
way, take over the functions assigned in economic theory 


Ownership and the Competitive System 223 

•f . „ ' » ' - 

to the “ entrepreneurin that they are men of general 
technological training and insight, who go into their 
inquiry on the ground of workmanship, take their data 
in terms of workmanship and convert them into terms 
of business expediency, somewhat to the same purpose 
as the like work of conversion was done by the owner- 
employers under that small-scale system of industrial 
enterprise from which the current theoretical concept of 
the “entrepreneur’’ was derived. It is then the duty of 
these efficiency engineers to present the results so ob¬ 
tained, for the conviction and guidance of the business¬ 
men in charge, who thereupon, if their business training 
has left them enough of a sense of workmanship, will give 
permissive instructions to the expert workmen in direct 
charge of the industrial processes to put these statisti¬ 
cally indicated changes into effect. It is the testimony 
of these efficiency engineers that relatively few pecuniary 
captains in command of industrial enterprises have a 
sufficient comprehension of the technological facts to 
understand and accept the findings of the technological 
experts who so argue for the elimination of preventable 
wastes, even when the issue is presented statistically 
in terms of price. These men go about their work of 
ascertaining the efficiency, actual and potential, of any 
given plant, process, working force, or parcel of material 
resources, by the methods of precise physical measure¬ 
ment familiar to mechanical engineers, and as an out¬ 
come they have no hesitation in speaking of preventable 
wastes amounting to ten, twenty, fifty, or even ninety 
per-cent, in the common run of American industries. 1 

1 Cf. Harrington Emerson, Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and 
Wages. 


224 The Instinct of Workmanship 

The work of the efficiency engineers being always done 
in the service of business and with a view to business 
expediency, their findings bear directly on the business 
exigencies of the case alone, and give definitive results 
only in terms of price and profits. How much greater 
the ascertained discrepancies in the case would appear if 
these findings could be reduced to terms of serviceability 
to the community at large, there is no means of forming 
a secure conjecture. That the discrepancy would in 
such case prove to be appreciably greater than that 
shown by the price rating is not doubtful. Under such 
an appraisal, where the given industrial enterprises 
would be brought to the test of net serviceability to the 
community instead of the net gain of the interested 
businessmen, many industrial enterprises would doubtless 
show a waste of appreciably more than one hundred 
per cent of their current output, being rather disservice- 
able to the community’s material welfare than otherwise. 

That the business community is so permeated with 
incapacity and lack of insight in technological matters 
is doubtless due proximately to the fact that their atten¬ 
tion is habitually directed to the pecuniary issue of in¬ 
dustrial enterprise; but more fundamentally and un¬ 
avoidably it is due to the large volume and intricate 
complications of the current technological scheme, which 
will not permit any man to become a competent specialist 
in an alien and exacting field of endeavour, such as busi¬ 
ness enterprise, and still acquire and maintain an effectual 
working acquaintance with the state of the industrial 
arts. The current technological scheme cannot be 
mastered as a matter of commonplace information or 
a by-occupation incidental to another pursuit. The 


Ownership and the Competitive System 22^ 

i 

same advance to a large and exhaustive technological 
system, in the machine industry, that has thrown the 
direction of industrial affairs into the hands of men pri¬ 
marily occupied with pecuniary management has also 
made it impossible for men so circumstanced at all 
adequately to exercise the oversight and direction of 
industry thereby required at their hands. And the an¬ 
cient principles of self-help and pecuniary gain by vir¬ 
tue of which these men are held to their work of business 
enterprise make it also impossible for them adequately 
to surrender the discretionary care of the industrial 
processes to other hands or to permit the management 
of industry to proceed on other than these same business 
principles. 

This technological infirmity of the businessmen as¬ 
suredly does not arise from a lack of interest in indus¬ 
try, since it is only out of the net product of industry 
that the business community’s gains are drawn—except 
so far as they are substantially gains of account¬ 
ancy merely, due to an inflation of values. Perhaps no 
class of men have ever been more keenly alert in their 
interest in industrial matters than the modern business¬ 
men; and this interest extends not only to the industrial 
ventures in which they may for the time be pecuniarily 
“ interested,” but also and necessarily to other lines of 
industry that are more or less closely correlated wdth 
the one in which the given businessman’s fortunes are 
embarked; for under modern market conditions any 
given line of industrial enterprise is bound in endless 
relations of give and take with all the rest. But this 
unremitting attention of businessmen to the affairs 
of industry is a business attention, and, so far as may be, 


226 The Instinct of Workmanship 

4 *+ ^ 

it touches nothing but the pecuniary phenomena con¬ 
nected with the ownership of industry; so that it comes 
rather to a training in the art of keeping in touch with 
the pecuniary run of business affairs while avoiding all 
undue intimacy with the technological facts of industry, 
—undue in the sense of being in excess of what may serve 
the needs of a comprehensive short-term outlook over 
market relations, and which would therefore divert 
attention from this main interest and befog the pecuniary 
logic by which businessmen are governed. 

Probably, also, no class of men have ever bent more 
unremittingly to their work than the modern business 
community. Within the business community there is 
properly speaking no leisure class, or at least no idle 
class. In this respect there is a notable contrast between 
the business community and the landed interest. What 
there is to be found in this modern culture in the way of 
an idle class, considered as an institution, runs back for 
its origins and its specific traits to a more archaic cultural 
scheme; it is a survival from an earlier (predatory) 
phase of the pecuniary culture. In the nature of things 
an idle life of fashion is an affair of the nobility (gentry), 
of predatory antecedents and, under current condi¬ 
tions, of predatory-parasitic habits; and as regards those 
modern rich men who withdraw from the business com¬ 
munity and fall into a state of otium cum dignitatc, it is 
commonly their fortune to be assimilated by a more or 
less ceremonial induction into the body of this quasi- 
predatory gentry or nobility and so assume an imitative 
colouring of archaism. 

The business community is hard at work, and there is 
no place in it for anyone who is unable or unwilling to 


Ownership and the Competitive System 


227 


work at the high tension of the average; and since this 
close application to pecuniary work is of a competitive 
nature it leaves no chance for any of the competitors to 
apply himself at all effectually to other than pecuniary 
work. This high tension of work is felt to be very meri¬ 
torious in all modern communities, somewhat in pro¬ 
portion as they are modern; as is necessarily the case 
in any work that is substantially of an emulative char¬ 
acter. It spends itself on salesmanship, not on workman¬ 
ship in the naive sense; although the all-pervading pre¬ 
occupation with pecuniary matters in modern times has 
led to its being accounted the type of workmanlike 
endeavour. It concerns itself ultimately with the pe¬ 
cuniary manipulation of the material equipment of in¬ 
dustry, though there is much of it that does not bear 
immediately on that point. The exceptions under this 
broad proposition are more apparent than real, although 
there doubtless are exceptions actual as well as apparent. 
In such a case the business transactions in question are 
likely to bear on the ownership of certain specific ele¬ 
ments of the immaterial technological equipment, as 
e. g., habits of thought covered by parent-right or me¬ 
chanical expedients covered by franchise. Beyond these 
there are elements of “good-will” that are subject of 
traffic and that consist in preferential advantages in 
respect of purely pecuniary transactions having to do 
not with the material equipment but with the right 
to deal with it and its management, as e. g., in banking, 
underwriting, insurance, and the phenomena of the 
money market at large. 


But the mature business situation as it runs today is a 


228 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


complex affair, large and intricate, wherein the effective 
relations in which business traffic stands to workmanship 
and to the community’s immaterial equipment of tech¬ 
nological knowledge at large are greatly obscured by 
their own convolutions and by the institutional arrange¬ 
ments and convictions to which this traffic has given 
rise. So that the matter is best approached by way of a 
genetic exposition that shall take as its point of departure 
that simpler business enterprise of early modern times 
out of which the larger development of the present has 
grown by insensible accretions and displacements. 

Business enterprise came in the course of time to take 
over the affairs of industry and so to withdraw these 
affairs from the tutelage of the gilds. This shifting of 
the effectual discretion in the management of industrial 
affairs came on gradually and in varying fashion and 
degree over a considerable interval of time. But the 
decisive general circumstance that enforced this move 
into the modern way of doing was an advance in the 
scope and method of workmanship. 1 What threw the 
fortunes of the industrial community into the hands of 
the owners of accumulated wealth was essentially a 
technological change, or rather a complex of technological 
changes, which so enlarged the requirements in respect 
of material equipment that the impecunious workmen 
could no longer carry on their trade except by a working 
arrangement with the owners of this equipment; whereby 

1 Cf., e. g., Karl Bucher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, (3d ed.), 
ch. iv, “Die gewerblichen Betriebssysteme,” ch. v. “Der Niedergang 
des Handwerks;” W. J. Ashley, English Economic History and Theory , 
part ii, ch. i, sec. 25, ch. iii, especially sec. 44; W. Cunningham, The 
Growth of English Industry and Commerce , vol. ii, Introduction; Werner 
Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus , bk. i, especially ch. iv-xii. 


22Q 


Ownership and the Competitive System 

the discretionary control of industry was shifted from the 
craftsmen’s technological mastery of the ways of industry 
to the owner’s pecuniary mastery of the material means. 
In the change that so took place to a larger technological 
scale much was doubtless due to the extension of trade, 
itself in great part an outcome of technological changes, 
directly and indirectly. For the craftsmen and their 
work the outcome was that recourse must be had to the 
material equipment owned by those who owned it, and on 
such terms as would content the owners; whereby the 
usufruct of the workmen’s proficiency and of the state of 
the industrial arts fell to the owners of the material 
equipment, on such terms as might be had. 1 So it fell 
to these owners of the material means and of the products 

1 To complete the sketch at this point, even in outline, it would be nec¬ 
essary to go extensively into the relations of ownership and control 
(largely indirect) in which the owners of land and natural resources, the 
Landed Interest, had stood to the industrial community of craftsmen 
before this transition to the business era got under way, as also into the 
further mutual relations subsisting between the landed interest, the 
craftsmen and the business community during this transition to a busi¬ 
ness regime. In the most summary terms the pertinent circumstances 
appear to have been that from the beginning of its technological era the 
handicraft community, with its workmanship and its technological at¬ 
tainments, was in an uncertain measure at the discretionary call of the 
landed interest, largely in an impersonal way through channels of trade 
and on the whole with decreasingly exacting effect as time went on; and 
the industrial community at large had by no means emancipated them¬ 
selves from this control when the era of business enterprise set in; for the 
landed interest continued to draw its livelihood from the mixed agri¬ 
cultural and handicraft community, and the products of handicraft still 
continued to go chiefly as supplies to the landed interest in return for the 
means of subsistence controlled by the latter; and long after the business¬ 
men had taken over the direction of industry the claims of the landed 
interest still continued paramount in the economic situation, and indus¬ 
try still continued to be carried on largely with a view to meeting the 
requirements of the landed interest. 


230 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


of industry to turn this technological situation to ac¬ 
count for their own gain, with as little abatement as 
might be, and at the same time it became incumbent on 
them each and several competitively to divert as large 
a share of the community’s productive efficiency to his 
own profit as the circumstances would permit. 


i 


CHAPTER VI 

The Era of Handicraft 1 

Owing, probably, to the peculiar topography of Eu¬ 
rope, small-scale and broken, the pastoral-predatory cul¬ 
ture has never been fully developed or naturalised in this 
region; nor has a monarchy of the great type character¬ 
istic of western Asia ever run its course in Europe. The 
nearest approach to such a despotic state would be the 
Roman Empire; which was after all essentially Med¬ 
iterranean, largely Levantine, rather than peculiarly 
European. And owing probably to the same condition¬ 
ing limitations of topography the subsequent sequence of 
institutional phenomena have also been characteristically 
different in this European region from that in the large 
and fertile lands of the near East. It is necessarily this 
run of events in the Western culture that is of chief 
interest to the present inquiry; which will therefore 
most conveniently follow the historical outlines of this 
culture in its later phases, in so far as these outlines are 
to be drawn in economic terms of a large generality. 

In a passably successful fashion the peoples of Chris¬ 
tendom made the transition from a frankly predatory 

1 “Handwerk (im engeren Sinne) ist diejenige Wirtschaftsform, die 
hervorwachst aus dem streben eines gewerblichen Arbeiters seine zwischen 
Kunst und gewohnlicher Handarbeit die Mitte haltende Fertigkeit zur 
Herrichtung oder Bearbeitung gewerblicher Gebrauchsgegenstande in 
der Weise zu vertreten, dass er sich durch Austausch seiner Leistungen 
oder Erzeugnisse gegen entsprechende Aquivalente seinen Lebensunter* 
halt verschaSt*” —Sombart, Modern# KapikUimus, bk. i, ch. iv. 

231 


232 The Instinct of Workmanship 

and servile establishment, in the Dark Ages, to a settled, 
quasi-peaceable situation resting on fairly secure prop¬ 
erty rights, chiefly in land, by the close of the Middle 
Ages. This transition was accompanied by a growth 
of handicraft, itinerant merchandising and industrial 
towns, so massive as to outlive and displace the feudal 
system under whose tutelage it took its rise, and of so 
marked a technological character as to have passed into 
history as the “era of handicraft.” Technologically, 
this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of 
craftsmanship; until it passes over into the regime of 
the machine industry when its technology had finally 
outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty 
trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of 
economic history. In its beginning the handicraft 
system was made up of impecunious craftsmen, working 
in severalty and working for a livelihood, and the rules 
of the craft-gilds that presently took shape and exercised 
control were drawn on that principle. 1 The petty trade 
which characteristically runs along with the develop¬ 
ment of handicraft was carried on after the same detail 
fashion and was presently organised on lines afforded by 
the same principle of work for a livelihood. 

Presently, however, in early modern times, larger hold¬ 
ings of property came to be employed in the itinerant 
trade, and investment for a profit found its way into this 
trade as also into the handicraft system proper. The 
processes of industry grew more extensive and round¬ 
about, the specialisation of occupations (“division of 

1 Cf. Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus , bk. i; W. J. Ashley, English 
Economic History and Theory , bk. i, especially ch. iii; Karl Bucher, die 
Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft , ch. iv, v, y 


The Era of Handicraft 


2 33 


labour”) increased, the scale of organisation grew larger, 
and the practice of employing impecunious workmen in 
organised bodies under the direction of wealthier masters 
came to be the prevailing form taken by the industry of 
the time. 

From near the beginning of the handicraft system, 
and throughout the period of its flourishing, the output of 
the industry was habitually sold at a price, in terms of 
money. In the earlier days the price was regulated on the 
basis of labour cost, on the principle that a competent 
craftsman must be allowed a fair livelihood, and much 
thought and management was spent on the determination 
and maintenance of such a “just price.” But in the 
course of generations, with further development of trade 
and markets, this conception of price by degrees gave 
way to or passed over into the modern presumption that 
any article of value is worth what it will bring; until, 
when the era of handicraft and petty trade merges in 
the late-modern regime of investment and machine 
industry, it has become the central principle of pecuniary 
relations that price is a matter to be arranged freely 
between buyer and seller on the basis of bargain and sale. 

The characteristic traits of this era are the handicraft 
industry and the petty trade which handled the output 
of that industry, with the trade gradually coming into a 
position of discretionary management, and even domina¬ 
ting the industry of the craftsmen to such an extent that 
by the date when the technology of handicraft begins 
to give way to the factory organisation and the machine 
industry the workmen are already somewhat fully under 
the control of the businessmen. Visibly, the ruling cause 
of this change in the relations between the craftsmen 


234 The Instinct of Workmanship 

on the one hand and the traders and master-employers 
on the other hand was the increasing magnitude of the 
material means necessary to the pursuit of industry, 
due to such a growth of technology as required an ever 
larger, more finished and more costly complement of 
appliances. So that in the course of the era of handicraft 
the ancient relation between owners and workmen 
gradually re-established itself within the framework of 
the new technology; with the difference that the owners 
in whose hands the discretion now lay, and to whose 
gain the net output of industry now inured, were the 
businessmen, investors, the owners of the industrial 
plant and of the apparatus of trade, instead of as for¬ 
merly the owners of the soil. 

Under the handicraft system, and to the extent to 
which that system shaped the situation, the instinct of 
workmanship again came into a dominant position 
among the factors that made up the discipline of daily 
life and so gave their characteristic bent to men’s habits 
of thought. In the technology of handicraft the central 
fact is always the individual workman, whether in the 
crafts proper or in the petty trade. In that era industry 
is conceived in terms of the skill, initiative and applica¬ 
tion of the trained individual, and human relations out¬ 
side of the workshop tend also by force of habit to be 
conceived in similar terms of self-sufficient individuals, 
each working out his own ends in severalty. 

The position of the craftsman in the economy of that 
time is peculiarly suited to induce a conception of the 
individual workman as a creative agent standing on his 
own bottom, and as an ultimate, irreducible factor in the 


The Era of Handicraft 


235 


community’s make-up. He draws on the resources of his 
own person alone; neither his ancestry nor the favour of 
his neighbours have visibly yielded him anything beyond 
an equivalent for work done; he owes nothing to in¬ 
herited wealth or prerogative, and he is bound in no 
relation of landlord or tenant to the soil. With his 
slight outfit of tools he is ready and competent of his own 
motion to do the work that lies before him, and he asks 
nothing but an even chance to do what he is fit to do. 
Even the training which has given him his finished skill 
he has come by through no special favour or advantage, 
having given an equivalent for it all in the work done 
during his apprenticeship and so having to all appear¬ 
ance acquired it by his own force and diligence. The 
common stock of technological knowledge underlying 
all special training was at that time still a sufficiently 
simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily ac¬ 
quired in the routine of work, without formal application 
to the learning of it; and any indebtedness to the com¬ 
munity at large or to past generations for such common 
stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently 
apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s 
naive appraisal of his productive capacity in the simple 
and complacent terms of his own person. 

The man who does things, who is creatively occupied 
with fashioning things for use, is the central fact in the 
scheme of things under the handicraft system, and the 
range of concepts by use of which the technological 
problems of that era are worked out is limited by the 
habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in 
hand and in those who see it done. The discipline of the 
crafts inculcates the apprehension of mechanical facts 


236 


The Instinct of Workmanship 

and processes in terms of workmanlike endeavour and 
achievement; so that questions as to what forces are 
available for use, and of how to turn them to account, 
present themselves in terms of muscular force and manual 
dexterity. Mechanical appliances for use in industry 
are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate 
or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour 
that the whole industrial system is conceived and its 
incidence, value and output rated. 

Such a fashion of conceiving the operations and appli¬ 
ances of industry seems at the same time to fall in closely 
with men’s natural bent as given by the native instinct 
of workmanship; and fostered by the consistent drift 
of daily routine under the handicraft system this attitude 
grew into matter of course, and has continued to direct 
men’s thinking on industrial matters even long after 
the era of handicraft has passed and given place to the 
factory system and the large machine industry. So 
much so that throughout the nineteenth century, in 
economic speculations as well as in popular speech, the 
mechanical plant employed in industry has habitually 
been spoken of as “labour saving devices;” even such 
palpable departures from the manual workmanship of 
handicraft as the power loom, the smelting furnace, 
artificial waterways and highways, the steam engine 
and telegraphic apparatus, have been so classed. 

There need be no question but that these phenomena 
of the machine era will bear such an interpretation; 
the point of interest here is that such an interpretation 
should have been resorted to and should have commended 
itself as adequate and satisfactory when applied to these 
mechanical facts whose effective place in technology 


The Era of Handicraft 


237 


and in its bearing on the economy of human life has 
turned out to be so widely different from that range of 
manual operations with which it is so sought to assimilate 
them . 1 

The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an 
habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes 
in terms of manual workmanship,—muscular force and 
craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches 

1 A classic passage of Adam Smith shows this handicraft conception of 
the mechanics of industry: “The annual labour of every nation is the 
fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies 
of life which it annually consumes. ...” “But this proportion [of the 
produce to the consumers] must in every nation be regulated by two dif¬ 
ferent circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with 
which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion 
between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and 
that of those who are not so employed .”—Wealth of Nations , Introduc¬ 
tion, p. 1. 

Adam Smith consistently speaks of industry in terms of manual work¬ 
manship, as the traditions and the continued habitual outlook of that 
generation unavoidably led him to do; and the sweeping way in which 
his interpretation of economic life finds acceptance with his contempo¬ 
raries shows that in so doing he is speaking in full consonance with the 
prevailing conceptions of his time. He writes during the opening pas¬ 
sages of the machine era, but he speaks in terms of the past industrial 
era, from which his outlook on the economic situation and his conception 
of normal economic relations had been derived. It may be added that 
his conception of natural liberty in economic matters is similarly derived 
from the traditional situation, whose discipline during the later phases 
of the handicraft era inculcated freedom of ownership as applied to the 
workman’s product and freedom of bargain and sale as touches the traffic 
of the typical petty trader. And so thoroughly had this manner of con¬ 
ceiving industry and the economic situation been worked into the texture 
of men’s thinking, that the same line of interpretation continues to satisfy 
economic theory for a hundred years after Adam Smith had formulated 
this canon of economic doctrine, and after the situation to which it would 
apply had been put out by the machine industry and large business 
management. 


238 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes 
engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also 
necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers 
in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with 
the facts of industry, near or remote. It gives its specific 
character to the habits of life of the community that 
lives under its dispensation and by its means, and so it 
acts as an overruling formative guide in shaping the 
current habits of thought. 

The consequences of this habitual attitude, for the 
technology of the machine era that presently follows, 
are worth noting. The mechanical inventions and expe¬ 
dients that lead over from the era of handicraft, through 
what has been called the industrial revolution, to the 
later system of large industry, bear the marks of their 
handicraft origin. The early devices of the machine 
industry are uniformly contrivances for performing by 
mechanical means the same motions which the crafts¬ 
men in the given industries performed by hand and by 
man power; in great part, indeed, they set out with being 
contrivances to enable the workmen to perform the same 
manual operation in duplicate or multiple—(as in the 
early spinning and weaving machinery) or to perform a 
given operation with larger effect than was possible to 
the unaided muscular work (as in the beginnings of 
steam power). In their beginnings the new mechanical 
appliances are conceived as unproved tools, which extend 
the reach and power of the workman or which facilitate 
or lighten the manual operations in which he spends 
himself. They are, as they aim to be, labour saving 
devices, designed to further the workmanlike efficiency 
of the men in whose hands they are placed. 



The Era of Handicraft 


239 


The early history of steam power shows how closely this 
workmanlike conception limited the range of invention. 
It was first employed to pump water out of mines. In 
this use the pressure of the air on a piston, in a low- 
pressure cylinder, was brought to bear on a lever so 
suspended as to yield formally the same motion as a 
like lever previously moved by human muscle. After a 
long interval, sufficiently long to make the use of this 
intermittent pressure and the resulting reciprocating 
motion familiar and impersonal in men’s habitual appre¬ 
hension, the reciprocating motion was turned to use to 
produce a rotary motion,—after the fashion suggested 
by the treadle of a lathe or spinning wheel, which was 
already familiar enough to have been divested of some¬ 
thing of that fog of personality that had doubtless sur¬ 
rounded it at its first invention . 1 The next serious 

1 The case of the treadle applied to the production of rotary motion is 
typical of what happens to a technological element of the general class 
here under discussion. Such a new technological expedient appears at 
the outset to be apprehended in terms of manual workmanship; but 
presently it comes, through habitual use, to take its place as a mechanical 
functioning of the tools in whose use it takes effect,—to be associated in 
current apprehension with the mechanical appliances employed in its 
production and, by so much, dissociated from the person of the workman. 
In a measure, therefore, it falls into the category of impersonal facts that 
are available as technological raw material with which to go about the 
work in hand. With further use, and particularly with the interjection 
of further mechanical expedients between the workman and this given 
technological element, it will be conceived in progressively more objective 
fashion, as a fact of the mechanics of brute matter rather than an exten¬ 
sion of the workman’s manual reach; until it passes finally into the cate¬ 
gory of mechanical fact simply, obvious and commonplace through 
routine use; in which there remains but a vanishing residue of imputed 
personality, such as attaches to all conceptions of action. The given 
technological element in this way may be said to pass by degrees out of 
the workman’s “quasi-personal fringe” of manual effects, into the do- 



240 The Instinct of Workmanship 

move in the development of the steam engine is the in¬ 
vention of the automatic valves, for admission and escape 
of steam from the cylinder. According to the ancient 
myth, a boy whose work it was to shift the valves by 
hand, contrived to connect them by cords with the mov¬ 
ing parts of the machine in such a way as to lift them at 
the proper moment by the motion of the machine it¬ 
self; so making the machine perform what had in the 
original concept of the valve mechanism been a manual 
operation. Later still, after the due interval for ex- 
ternalisation and assimilation of this mechanical valve 
movement as an impersonal fact of the machine process, 
further improvement and elaboration of the elements 
so gained has worked out in the highly finished mechan¬ 
ism familiar to later times. 

Detail scrutiny of any one of the greater mechanical 
inventions, or series of inventions, will bring out some¬ 
thing of the same character as is seen in the sequence 
of successive gains that make up the history of the steam 
engine. It is to be noted in this connection that time 
appears to be of the essence of the process of mechanical 


main of raw material available for use in workmanship; where it will, in 
apprehension, be possessed of only such imputed quasi-personal or an¬ 
thropomorphic characteristics as are necessarily imputed to external 
facts at large. 

Concretely, the concept of the treadle seems in its beginnings to be a 
variant of the same conception that leads to the use of the bow-drill. 
Both inventions comprise at least two distinct forms. In each the simpler 
and presumably more primitive form converts a reciprocating longitud¬ 
inal motion into a reciprocating rotary motion; and it is apparently only 
after an interval of familiarity and externalisation of this mechanical 
achievement that the next move takes place in the direction of the per¬ 
fected treadle, which converts a reciprocating longitudinal into a con¬ 
tinuous rotary motion. 


The Era of Handicraft 


241 


invention in any field; so much so, indeed, that it will 
commonly be found that any single inventor contrib¬ 
utes but one radical innovation in any one particular 
connection; which may then presently be taken up again 
as a securely objective element by a later inventor and 
pushed forward by a new move as radical as that to 
which this original invention owed its origin. This time 
interval which plays such a part in mechanical inventions 
appears necessary only as an interval of habituation, for 
the due externalisation of the element, to relieve it, by 
neglect, of the personal equation with which it is contami¬ 
nated as it first comes into use, and so to leave it such an 
objective concept as may be turned to account as mere 
technological raw material. 

It appears, then, that the accumulation of technologi¬ 
cal experience is not of itself sufficient to bring out a 
consecutive improvement of the industrial arts, particu¬ 
larly not such an advance in the industrial arts as is 
embodied in the machine technology of late-modern 
times. In this modern machine technology the ruling 
norm is the highly impersonal, not to say brutal, concept 
of mechanical process, blind and irresponsible. The logic 
of this technology, accordingly, is the logic of the ma¬ 
chine process,—a logic of masses, velocities, strains and 
thrusts, not of personal dexterity, tact, training, and 
routine. In the degree in which the information that 
comes to hand comes encumbered with a teleological 
bias, a connotation of personal bent, it is unavailable or 
refractory under this logic. But all new information 
is infused with such an anthropomorphic colouring of 
personality; which may presently decay and give place 
to a more objective habitual apprehension of the facts 


The Instinct of Workmanship ’ 


242 

y 

in case use and wont play up the mechanical character 
and bearing of these facts in subsequent experience of 
them; or which may on the other hand end by giving 
its definitive character and value to the acquired informa¬ 
tion in case it should happen that the facts of experience 
are by use and wont bent to an habitual anthropomorphic 
rating and employment. To serve the needs of this 
machine technology, therefore, the information which 
accumulates must in some measure be divested of its 
naive personal colouring by use and wont; and the degree 
in which this effect is had is a measure of the degree of 
availability of the resulting facts for the uses of the 
machine technology. The larger the available body 
of information of this character, and the more compre¬ 
hensive and unremitting the share taken by the dis¬ 
cipline of the machine process in the routine of daily 
life, therefore, the greater, other things equal, will be 
the rate of advance in the technological mastery of 
mechanical facts. 

But much else goes to the makeup of use and wont 
besides the routine of industry and the ultilisation of 
those mechanical processes and that output of goods 
which the modern machine industry places at men’s dis¬ 
posal. To put the same thing in terms already employed 
in another connection, the sense of workmanship is still 
subject to contamination with other impulsive elements 
of human nature working under the constraining limita¬ 
tions imposed by divers conventional canons and prin¬ 
ciples of conduct; besides being constantly subject to 
self-contamination in the way of an anthropomorphic 
interpretation that construes the facts of experience in 
terms of a craftsmanlike bent. 


The Era of Handicraft 


243 


As bearing on the effectual reach of this self-contami¬ 
nation of the sense of workmanship it is pertinent to re¬ 
call that craftsmanship ran within a class, and so had the 
benefit of that accentuated sentiment of self-compla¬ 
cency that comes of class consciousness. From its be¬ 
ginnings down to the period of its dissolution the handi¬ 
craft industry is an affair of the lower classes; and, as is 
well known, class feeling runs strong throughout the era, 
particularly through the centuries of its best develop¬ 
ment. Whether their conceit is wholly a naive self- 
complacency or partly a product of affectation, the 
sentiment is well in evidence and marks the attitude of 
the handicraft community with a characteristic bias. 
The craftsmen habitually rate themselves as service¬ 
able members of the community and contrast themselves 
in this respect with the other orders of society who are 
not occupied with the production of things serviceable 
for human use. To the creative workman who makes 
things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit 
of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the 
type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. 
The other orders of society and other employments of 
time and effort may of course be well enough in their 
way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality 
which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to 
himself and his work. And so good a case does the crafts¬ 
man make out on this head, and so convincingly evident 
is the efficiency of the skilled workman, and so patent is 
his primacy in the industrial community, that by the 
close of the era much the same view has been accepted 
by" all orders of society. 

Such a bias pervading the industrial community must 


244 The Instinct of Workmanship 

greatly fortify the native bent to construe all facts of 
observation in anthropomorphic terms. But the training 
given by the petty trade of the handicraft era, on the 
other hand, is not altogether of this character. The 
itinerant merchant’s huckstering, as well as the buying 
and selling in which all members of the community w r ere 
concerned, would doubtless throw the personal strain 
into the foreground and would act to keep the self-regard¬ 
ing sentiments alert and active and accentuate an in¬ 
dividualistic appreciation of men and things. But the 
habit of rating things in terms of price has no such tend¬ 
ency, and the price concept gains ground throughout 
the period. Wherever the handicraft system reaches a 
fair degree of development the daily life of the community 
comes to centre about the market and to take on the 
character given by market relations. The volume 
of trade grows greater, and purchase and sale enter more 
thoroughly into the details of the work to be done and of 
the livelihood to be got by this work. The price system 
comes into the foreground. With the increase of traffic, 
book-keeping comes into use among the merchants; and 
as fast as the practice of habitual recourse to the market 
grows general, the uncommercial classes also become 
familiar with the rudimentary conceptions of book¬ 
keeping, even if they do not make much use of formal 
accounts in their own daily affairs . 1 

The logic and concepts of accountancy are wholly 
impersonal and dispassionate; and whether men’s use 
of its logic and concepts takes the elaborate form of a 
set of books or the looser fashion of an habitual rating 

1 Cf. Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, bk. i, Exkurs zu KapJtel 7, 
bk. ii, ch. xv. 


The Era of Handicraft 


MS 


of gains, losses, income, and outgo in terms of price, its 
effect is unavoidably in some degree to induce a statistical 
habit of mind. It makes immediately for an exact quan¬ 
titative apprehension of all things and relations that 
have a pecuniary bearing; and more remotely, by force 
of the pervasive effect of habituation, it makes for a 
greater readiness to apprehend all facts in a similarly 
objective and statistical fashion, in so far as the facts 
admit of a quantitative rating. Accountancy is the be¬ 
ginning of statistics, and the price concept is a type of 
the objective, impersonal, quantitative apprehension of 
things. Coincidently, because they do not lend them¬ 
selves to this facile rating, facts that will not admit of a 
quantitative statement and statistical handling decline 
in men’s esteem, considered as facts, and tend in some 
degree to lose the cogency which belongs to empirical 
reality. v ' They may even come to be discounted as 
being of a lower order of reality, or may even be denied all 
factual value. 

Doubtless, the price system had much to do with the 
rise of the machine technology in modern times; not only 
in that the accountancy of price offered a practical form 
and method of statistical computation, such as is in¬ 
dispensable to anything that may fairly be classed as 
engineering, but also and immediately and substan¬ 
tially in that its discipline has greatly conduced to the 
apprehension of mechanical facts in terms not coloured 
by an imputed anthropomorphic bent. It has probably 
been the most powerful factor acting positively in early 
modem times to divest mechanical facts of that imputed 
workmanlike bent given them by habits of thought in¬ 
duced by the handicrafts. 


246 The Instinct of Workmanship 

This reduction of the facts of observation to quantita¬ 
tive and objective terms is perhaps most visible not in 
the changes that come over the technology of industry 
directly, in early modern times, but rather in that growth 
of material science that runs along as a concomitant of 
the expansion of the mechanical industry during the 
later era of handicraft. The material sciences, partic¬ 
ularly those occupied with mechanical phenomena, 
are closely related to the technology of the mechanical 
industries, both in their subject matter and in the scope 
and method of the systematisation of knowledge at 
which they aim; and it is in these material sciences that 
the concomitance is best seen, at the same time that it is 
the advance achieved in these sciences that most un¬ 
equivocally marks the transition from mediaeval to 
modern habits of thought. This modern interest in 
matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achieve¬ 
ments in material science, comes to an effectual head 
wherever and so soon as the handicraft industry has 
made a considerable advance, in volume and in tech¬ 
nological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of 
trade and make thoughtful men passably familiar with 
the statistical conceptions of the price system. 

It is accordingly in the commercial republics of Italy 
that the modern growth of material science takes its 
first start, about the point of time when industry and 
commerce had reached their most flourishing state on the 
Mediterranean seaboard and when the attention of these 
communities was already swinging off from these material 
interests to high-handed politics and religious reaction. 
The higher interests of church and state came to the front, 
and science, industry, and presently commerce dwindled 


The Era of Handicraft 


247 


and decayed in the land that had promised so handsomely 
to lead Western civilisation out of the underbrush of 
piety and princely intrigue. 

Next followed the Low Countries, with the south Ger¬ 
man industrial centres, where again industry of the hand¬ 
icraft order grew great, gave rise to trade on a rapidly 
increasing scale, and presently to an era of business enter¬ 
prise of unprecedented spirit and scope. But the age of 
the Fuggers closed in bankruptcy and industrial collapse 
when the princely wrangles of the era of statemaking 
had used up the resources of the industrial community 
and exhausted the credit of that generation of captains 
of industry. Here too religious contention came in for 
its share in the set-back of industry and commerce. In 
their economic outlines the two cases are very much of 
the same kind. Central Europe ran through much the 
same cycle of industrial growth, commercial enterprise, 
princely ambitions, dynastic wars, religious fanaticism, 
exhaustion and insecurity, and industrial collapse and 
decay,—substantially repeating, on an enlarged scale 
and with much added detail, the sequence that had 
brought South Europe into arrears. Meantime the 
material sciences had come forward again in the West, 
and flourished at the hands of the Netherlanders, South 
Germans and French scholars, who under the favouring 
discipline of this new advance in industry and commerce 
had slowly come abreast of the same matter-of-fact 
conceptions that had once made Italy the home of modern 
science. And here again, as before, princely politics, 
with the attendant war, exactions and insecurity, fol¬ 
lowed presently by religious controversies and perse¬ 
cutions, not only put an end to the advance of industry 


248 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


and business but also checked the attendant develop* 
ment of science nearly to a standstill. 

So that when a further move of the kind is presently 
made it is the British community that takes the lead. 
Great Britain had been in arrears in all those respects 
that make up civilisation of the Occidental kind, and not 
least in the material respect; until the time when the 
peoples of the Continent by their own act fell into the 
rear in respect of those material interests—technology 
and business enterprise—which afford the material 
ground out of which the Occidental type of civilisation 
has grown. In Great Britain the sequence of these 
cultural phenomena has not been substantially different, 
taken by and large, from that which had previously 
been run through by the Continental communities; 
except that the same outcome was not reached, ap¬ 
parently because the sequence was not interrupted by 
collapse at the same critical point in the development. 

The run of events under the handicraft system in 
England differs in certain consequential features from 
that among the Continental peoples,—consequential 
for the purposes of this inquiry, whether of similarly 
grave consequence from the point of view given by any 
other and larger interest. These peculiar traits of the 
British era of handicraft yield a side light on the methods 
and reach of the handicraft discipline as a factor in 
civilisation at large, at the same time that a consideration 
of them should go to show how slender an initial differ¬ 
ence may come to be decisive of the outcome in case cir¬ 
cumstances give this initial difference a cumulative effect. 

As regards the ultimately substantial grounds of 
the British situation, in the way of racial make-up, 



The Era of Handicraft 


2 49 


natural resources, and cultural antecedents, the British 
community has no singular advantage or disadvantage 
as against its Continental competitors. What is true 
of England in respect of peculiarly favourable natural 
resources later on, about and after the close of the era 
of handicraft, does not hold for the beginnings or the 
best days of that era. Racially there is no appreciable 
difference between the English population of that time 
and the population of the Low Countries, of the Scan¬ 
dinavian peninsulas, or even of the nearer lying German 
territories; and no markedly characteristic national type 
of temperament had at that time been developed in Great 
Britain, as against the temperamental make-up of its 
Continental neighbours,—whatever may be conceived 
to have become the case in the nearer past. 

The characteristic, and apparently decisive, peculiari¬ 
ties of the British situation may all confidently be traced 
to the insular position of the country. Owing to the 
isolation so given to the Island the British community 
was notably in arrears in early modern times, as con¬ 
trasted with the more cultured, populous and wealthier 
peoples of the Continent; and this backward state of 
England in the earlier period of the era of handicraft 
is no less marked in respect of technology than in any 
other. As is well known, England borrowed extensively 
and persistently from its Continental neighbours through¬ 
out the era, and it was only by help of these borrowed 
elements that the English were able to overtake and fi¬ 
nally to take the lead of their competitors. Similarly, the 
British commercial development also comes on late as 
compared with the Continent; so much so that the British 
had substantially no share in the great expansion of 


250 The Instinct of Workmanship 

business enterprise that has been called the Age of the 
Fuggers. This late start of the English, coupled with 
their peculiar advantage in being able to borrow what 
their neighbours had worked out, conduced to a more 
rapid rate and shorter run of industrial advance and 
expansion in the Island, and so, among other conse¬ 
quences, hindered the rounded system of handicraft, in¬ 
dustrial towns, and gild organisation from attaining the 
same degree of finality, and ultimately of obstructive in¬ 
ertia, that resulted in many of the Continental countries. 

Again, owing to the same geographic isolation that 
long held England culturally in arrears, the English 
community lay, in great measure, outside of that political 
“ concert of nations” that worked out the exhaustion 
and collapse of industry and business on the Continent. 
Not that the English took no interest in the grand whirl 
of politics and princely war that occupied the main body 
of Christendom in that time. The English crown, or 
to use a foreign expression, the English State, was deeply 
enough implicated in the political intrigues of late 
mediaeval and early modern Europe; but as modern 
time has advanced the English community has visibly 
hung back with an ever growing reluctance. And what¬ 
ever may be conceived to be the share of the English 
crown in the political complications of the Continent, 
it remains true that the English community at large, 
during the mature and concluding phases of the era of 
handicraft, stood mainly and habitually outside of these 
princely concerns. 1 In effect, after the handicraft era 

1 The adventures of Charles I and James II sufficiently illustrate this 
insular temper of the industrial and commercial community as con¬ 
trasted with the crown and the court party. 


•/■ : i*** \\ «■*■* 


The Era of Handicraft 


251 


was well under way, England is never for long or pri¬ 
marily engaged in international war, nor, except for the 
civil war of the Commonwealth period, in destructive 
war of any kind. Hence the era runs to a different out¬ 
come in England from what it does elsewhere. It ends 
not in the exhaustion of politics, but in the industrial 
revolution. The close of the handicraft system in Eng¬ 
land comes by way of a technological revolution, not by 
collapse. 

To this attempted explanation of the English case, 
as due to its geographic isolation, the objection may well 
suggest itself that other cases which parallel the British 
in this respect do not show like results. So, for instance, 
the Scandinavian countries enjoyed an isolation nearly 
if not quite as effective as that of Great Britain during 
this period of history; whereas the outcome in these 
countries is notoriously not the same. The Scandinavian 
case, however, differs in at least one essential respect, 
which seems decisive even apart from secondary cir¬ 
cumstances. These countries were too small to make 
up a self-supporting community under the conditions 
required by the system of handicraft. They had neither 
the population nor the natural resources on such a scale 
as a passably full development of the handicraft system 
required. At any advanced stage of its growth the sys¬ 
tem can work out into 7 a self-balanced technological 
organisation, with full specialisation of labour and local 
differentiation of industry, only in a community of a 
certain (considerable) size. This condition was not met 
by the Scandinavian countries. Hence they remained 
in a relatively backward state, on the whole, through 
the handicraft era, and never reached anything like an 


252 The Instinct of Workmanship 

independent position in the industrial world of that time, 
either technologically or in point of commercial develop¬ 
ment; hence also they failed to achieve or maintain 
that degree of independence, or isolation, in their political 
relations that left England free to pursue a self-directed 
course of material development. 

At an earlier period, as, for instance, from neolithic 
times down to the close of paganism, under the slighter, 
less differentiated, less complex technological conditions 
of a more primitive state of the industrial arts, the 
Scandinavian countries had, each and several, proved 
large enough for a very efficient industrial organisation; 
and, again, during the early historical period they had 
also proved to be of a sufficient and suitable size to make 
up national units of a thoroughly competent sort, auton¬ 
omous politically as well as industrially and working 
out their own fortunes in severalty,—very much as the 
British community does later on, in the days of the later 
handicraft era and the early growth of the machine in¬ 
dustry. But during the era of handicraft, and indeed 
somewhat in a progressive fashion as the technology of 
that era grew to a fuller development and required 
larger territorial dimensions, the Scandinavian countries 
lost ground, relatively to the larger communities of Great 
Britain and the Continent; in a degree they progressively 
lost autonomy both in the political and the industrial 
respect, and much the same is to be said for their position 
in point of general culture. This falling into arrears and 
dependence is least marked in the case of Sweden, the 
largest and still passably isolated community among 
them; and it is most marked in the case of Norway and 
Iceland, the most isolated but at the same time the least 


The Era of Handicraft 


253 


sizable units of the Scandinavian group. In material 
sciences, that most characteristic trait of the Western 
culture, the case of these peoples is much the same as 
in the matter of technology and cultural autonomy at 
large; the largest of them has the most to show. 

Great Britain, on the other hand, fulfilled the condi¬ 
tions of size and isolation demanded in order to a free 
development of the industrial arts during this era, when 
the traffic in dynastic politics stood ready to absorb 
all accessible resources of industry and sentiment. And 
England accordingly takes the lead when the era of hand¬ 
icraft goes out and that of the new technology comes in. 

Material science of the modern sort has been drawn 
into the discussion as a cultural phenomenon closely 
bound up with the state of the industrial arts under the 
handicraft system. This modern science may, indeed, 
be taken as the freest manifestation of that habit of 
mind that comes to its more concrete expression in the 
technology of the time. To show the pertinency of such 
a recourse to the state of science as an outcome of the 
discipline exercised by the routine of life in the era of 
handicraft some further detail touching the state and 
progress of scientific inquiry during that period will be 
in place. 

In its beginnings, the theoretical postulates and pre¬ 
conceptions of modern science are drawn from the scho¬ 
lastic speculations of the late Middle Ages; the prob¬ 
lems which the new science undertook to handle, on the 
other hand, were, by and large, such concrete and mate¬ 
rial questions as the current difficulties of technology 
brought to the notice of the investigators. These tradi- 


254 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


tional postulates, preconceptions, canons, and logical 
methods that stood over from the past were essentially of 
a theological complexion, and were the outcome of much 
time, attention and insight spent on the systematisa¬ 
tion of knowledge in a cultural situation whose sub¬ 
stantial core was the relation of master and servant, 
and under the guidance of a theological bias worked out 
on the same ground. The postulates of this speculative 
body of knowledge and the preconceptions with which 
the scholastic speculators went to their work of systema¬ 
tisation, accordingly, are of a highly anthropomorphic 
character; but it is not the anthropomorphism of work¬ 
manship, at least not in the naive form which the sense 
of workmanship gives to anthropomorphic interpreta¬ 
tion among more primitive peoples. 1 It may be taken as 
a matter of course that the sense of workmanship is 
present in its native, direct presentment throughout the 
intellectual life of the middle ages, as it necessarily is 
under all the permutations of human culture; but it is 
equally a matter of course that the promptings of an 
unsophisticated sense of workmanship do not afford 
the final test of what is right and good in a cultural 
situation drawn on rigid lines of mastery and submission. 

During the middle ages the Faith had taken on an 
extremely authoritative and coercive character, to an¬ 
swer to the similar principles of organisation and control 
that ruled in secular affairs; so that at the transition 
to modern times the religious cult of Christendom was 
substantially a cult of fearsome subjection and arbitrary 
authority. Much else, of a more genial character, was 
of course comprised in the principles of the Faith of that 

1 See ch. ii and iii, above. 


The Era of Handicraft 


255 


time, but when all is said the fact remains that even in 
its genial traits it was a cult of irresponsible authority 
and abject submission,—a cult of the pastoral-predatory 
type, adapted and perfected to answer the circumstances 
of feudal Europe, and so embodying the principles (habits 
of thought) that characterised the feudal system. 

Notoriously, the fashions of religious faith change tar¬ 
dily. Such change is always of the nature of concession. 
And since the conceptions of the cult are of no material 
consequence, taken by themselves and in their direct 
incidence, they are subject, as such, to no direct or 
deliberate control or correction in behalf of the com¬ 
munity’s material interests or its technological require¬ 
ments. It is almost if not altogether by force of their 
consonance or dissonance with the prevailing habits of 
thought inculcated by the routine of life that any given 
run of religious verities find acceptance, command gen¬ 
eral adherence to their teaching, or become outworn and 
are discarded; and such lack of consonance must become 
very pronounced before a radical change of the kind 
in question will take effect. Barring conversion to a new 
faith, it is commonly by insensible shifts of adaptation 
and reconstruction that any wide-reaching change is 
worked out in these fundamental conceptions. Such 
was the character of the move by which the Mediaeval 
cult merged in the modernised theological concepts of a 
later age. 

Gradually, by force of unremitting habituation to a 
new scheme of life, and marked by long-drawn theologi¬ 
cal polemics, a change passed over the spirit of theologi¬ 
cal speculation, whereby the fundamentals of the faith 
were infused with the spirit of the handicraft system, 


256 The Instinct of Workmanship 

and the preconceptions of workmanship insensibly 
supplanted those of mastery and subservience in the 
working concepts of devout Christendom. Meantime, 
while the routine of the era of handicraft was slowly re¬ 
constructing the current conceptions of divinity on lines 
consonant with the habit of mind of workmanship, the 
ancient conceptions continued with gradually abating 
force to assert their prescriptive dominion over men’s 
habitual thinking. This gradually loosening hold of the 
ancient conceptions is best seen in the speculations of the 
philosophers and in the higher generalisations of scientific 
inquiry in early modern times. 

In the mediaeval speculations whether theological, 
philosophical or scientific, the search for truth runs back 
to the authentic ground of the religious verities,—largely 
to revealed truth; and these religious verities run back to 
the question, “What hath God ordained?” In the course 
of the era of handicraft this ultimate question of knowl¬ 
edge came to take the form, “What hath God wrought? ” 
Not that the creative office of God in the divine economy 
was overlooked or in any degree intentionally made 
light of by the earlier speculators; nor that the sov¬ 
ereignty of God was denied or in any degree questioned by 
those devout inquirers who carried forward the work in 
later time. But in that earlier phase of faith and inquiry 
it is distinctly the suzerainty of God, and His ordinances, 
that afford the ground of finality on which all inquiry 
touching the economy of this world ultimately come to 
rest; and in the later phase, as seen at the close of the 
era of handicraft, it is as distinctly His creative office 
and the logic of His creative design that fill the place 
of an ultimate term in human inquiry—as that inquiry 


The Era of Handicraft 257 

A',*" 

conventionally runs within the spiritual frontiers of 
Christendom. God had not ceased to be the Heavenly 
King, and had not ceased to be glorified with the tradi¬ 
tional phrases of homage as the Most High, the Lord 
of Hosts etc., but somewhat incongruously He had also 
come to be exalted as the Great Artificer—the preter¬ 
natural craftsman. The vulgar habits of thought bred 
in the workday populace by the routine of the workshop 
and the market place had stolen their way into the 
sanctuary and the counsels of divinity. 

Similarly, in the best days of scholastic learning 
scientific inquiry ran back for a secure foundation to the 
authentic ordinances of the Heavenly King; under the 
discipline of the era of handicraft it learned instead to 
push its inquiries to the ground of efficient cause, ulti¬ 
mately of course, in the philosophical liquidation of 
accounts in that devout age, to the creative efficiency of 
the First Cause. In the scientific inquiries of the earlier 
age the test of truth was the test of authenticity, and the 
logic of systematisation by use of which knowledge in 
that time was digested and stored away was essentially 
a logic of subsumption under securely authentic cate¬ 
gories that could be run back at need to the ascertained 
requirements of the glory of God. The canon of truth 
is that of the revealed word, reenforced and filled out 
with the quasi-divine Aristotelian scheme of things. It 
is a logic of hierarchical congruity in respect of potencies 
and qualities, suggestively resembling the devolution 
of powers and dignities under the finished scheme of 
feudalism. In the later age the good of man gradually, 
insensibly supplants the glory of God as the ultimate 
ground of systematisation. The sentimental ground of 


258 The Instinct of Workmanship 

conviction comes to be the recognised serviceability of 
the ascertained facts for human use, rather than their 
conformity with the putative exigencies of a self-centred 
divine will. The Providential Order that means so much 
in the scheme of knowledge in the mature years of the 
era of handicraft is an order imposed by a providentially 
beneficent Creator who looks to the good of man; as 
it has been expressed, it is a scheme of “humanism.” 

By the close of the era this beneficent providential 
order had worked out in an Order of Natfire, indued 
with the same meliorative trend; and in the sentimental 
conviction of the inquiring spirits of that age it lay in 
the nature of this beneficent order of the universe that 
in the end, in the finished product of its working, it would 
bring about the highest practicable state of well-being 
for man,—very much as any skilled workman of sound 
sense and a good heart would turn out good and service¬ 
able goods. And in this Order of Nature, as it runs 
in the matter-of-course convictions of thoughtful men 
at the close of the era, the person of the deity, even as 
a workmanlike creative Providence, had fallen into the 
background. The Order of Nature, with its scheme of 
Natural Law, is felt as the work of a consummately skil¬ 
ful and ingenious workmanlike agency that looks to a 
serviceable end to be accomplished; and the profoundly 
thoughtful scientific inquiry of that time harbours no 
doubt that this workmanlike agency of Nature at large 
rules the world of visible fact and will achieve its good 
work in good time. But this quasi-personal Nature is 
not reverenced for anything but its workmanlike quali¬ 
ties; the awe which it inspires is not the fear of God, 
such as that fear has played its part under the feudalistic 


The Era of Handicraft 


259 


rule of the church and sent men hunting cover from the 
imminent wrath to come. As he stands in the presence 
of this eighteenth-century Nature, man is not primarily 
a sinner seeking a remission of penalties at all costs, but 
rather a focus of workmanlike attention upon whose 
welfare all the forces of the visible universe beneficently 
converge. 

How this workmanlike Nature goes about her 1 work is 
no more plain to the casual spectator than are the re¬ 
condite processes of high-wrought handicraft to the un¬ 
instructed. But Nature after all accomplishes her ends in 
a workmanlike fashion, and by staying by and patiently 
watching the operations of Nature and construing the 
facts of observation by the sympathetic use of a rational 
common sense men may learn much of the methods of 
her manipulation as well as of the rules of procedure 
under whose guidance the works of Nature are accom¬ 
plished. For it is a matter of course to that generation 
that Nature is essentially rational in her aims and logic 
as well as in the technology of her work; very much 
after the fashion of the master craftsman, who goes to 
his work with an intelligent oversight of the available 


1 The imputation of the feminine in this personification of Nature is 
probably nothing more than a carrying over of the Latin gender of the 
word, but there is commonly involved in this quasi-personal conception 
of Nature a notable imputation of kindliness and gentle solicitude that 
well comports with her putative womanhood. By extraordinarily easy 
gradation Natura naturans passes over into Mother Nature. The con¬ 
trast in this respect, simply on its sentimental side, between the concep¬ 
tion of Nature, say in the eighteenth century, on the one hand, and the 
patriarchal Heavenly King, remote and austere, of the Mediaeval cult on 
the other hand is striking enough. In point of sentimental content this 
conception of Nature is more nearly in touch with the mediaeval Mother 
of God than with the Heavenly King. 


26 o 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


means and the purpose to be wrought out, as well as with 
a firm and facile touch on all that passes under his trained 
hand. Like the perfect craftsman, “ Nature never makes 
mistakes/’ “never makes a jump,” “never does any¬ 
thing in vain,” “never turns out anything but perfect 
work.” 

The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to 
its consummate issue are forces of Nature working under 
her Laws by the method of cause and effect. The prin¬ 
ciple, or “law,” of causation is a metaphysical postulate; 
in the sense that such a fact as causation is unproved 
and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of 
causation, as is a commonplace with the latterday 
psychologists. But such a doubt does not present itself 
seriously in the days of handicraft; it would be out of 
touch with the spirit of the time and the discipline of 
that craftsmanship out of which the spirit of the time 
arises. To the inquiring minds of that era it is a matter of 
course and of common sense that the forces of Nature 
are seen to work out the effects which emerge before their 
eyes. What they see in fact may be, as the modern psy¬ 
chologists would perhaps say, a certain concomitance 
and sequence in the observed phenomena; but what 
those observers see in effect is always a certain cause 
working out a certain effect. The imputation of causal 
efficiency to the observed phenomena is so thoroughly 
a matter of course that there is no sense of imputation 
in the observer’s mind. 

Observation simply, without imputation of anthro¬ 
pomorphic qualities and efficacies, should yield nothing 
more to the purpose than idle concomitance and se¬ 
quence of phenomena, but there is, in effect, none 


The Era of Handicraft 


261 


of this early scientific work done in terms of sim¬ 
ple concomitance or sequence alone; nor for that mat¬ 
ter, has any of the effective (theoretical) work of 
modern science been carried to an issue by the use of 
such objective terms of concomitance and sequence 
alone, whether in that or in a later age, without the help 
of a putative causal nexus. Through the early modern 
scientific period there runs an increasingly free and fre¬ 
quent recourse to statistical argument,—in the material 
sciences a recourse to punctilious measurement, enumera¬ 
tion, and instruments of precision; but it is of the essence 
of the case that the phenomenal facts which so are sub¬ 
jected to measurement and statistical computation are 
facts selected for the purpose on the strength of their 
(putatively) known causal implication in the problem 
whose solution is sought, and that the facts which emerge 
from these measurements, computations, and instru¬ 
ments of precision, are turned to account in an argument 
of cause and effect; they have served their purpose only 
when and in so far as they enable the inquirer to deter¬ 
mine the course of efficient transition from a putative 
cause to a putative effect, or conversely. 

The relation of cause and effect, as commonly conceived 
by the vulgar and as commonly employed by the scientist, 
is a putative relation between phenomena which can 
not be said to stand in any observed relation of efficiency 
to one another. Efficiency, as understood in this con¬ 
nection, is not a fact of observation, but of imputation; 
and efficiency, performance of work, is the substance 
of the causal relation as that concept is universally em¬ 
ployed in modern science. It may well be said that this 
recourse to the concept of efficient cause—a metaphysical 



262 The Instinct of Workmanship 

postulate touching a putative fact—is the distin¬ 
guishing characteristic of modern science as con¬ 
trasted with any other scheme of systematised knowl¬ 
edge. 1 

Not only does the development of modern science rest 
on this postulate of causality, but the concept of causa¬ 
tion which so characterises the modern sciences is of a 
particular and restricted kind. At least on the face of 
things it seems unquestionable that the peculiar temper 
and limitations of this modern European concept of 
causation are to be credited to the habits wrought out 
by a life under the handicraft system. It has been noted 
already that the ubiquitous prevalence of trade and of 
the price system in modern times has given to the modern 
apprehension of facts a certain objectivity, a degree of 

1 This, of course, does not overlook the fact that in the course of 
scientific inquiry there has been an increasing use of statistical methods 
and results, and that this recourse to statistics has been of an increas¬ 
ingly objective character, both in its methods and in the items handled. 
It is also to be noted that from time to time serious and consequential 
attempts have been made to reduce scientific argument at large to simi¬ 
larly objective terms of quantity, quantivalence and concomitance. 
Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science , for instance is a shrewd and somewhat 
popularly known endeavour of this kind. So, again, the philosophical 
views associated with the names of Leibnitz and of Berkely are of this 
nature, and there is not a little of the same line of scepticism in the 
speculations of Hume. But it is equally to be noted that except on the 
remote plane of generality that belongs to philosophical speculation, and 
except in the works of pure mathematics, this method of handling facts 
has not proved available for scientific ends. The “idle curiosity” which 
finds employment in scientific inquiry is not content with the vacant rela¬ 
tion of concomitance alone among the facts which it seeks and system¬ 
atises. In scientific theory no headway has been made hitherto without 
the use of this indispensable imputation of causality.—In this connection 
cf. a paper on “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” University 
cf California Chronicle , November, 1908, especially footnote, p. 396. 


The Era of Handicraft '263 

impersonality, which is at least a characteristic of modern 
knowledge, whether scientific or commonplace, even if it 
cannot be said to be a unique distinction of modern 
science as contrasted with other deliberate systems of 
knowledge. But it is the unique distinction of modern 
science, particularly as it comes into view in its early 
phases, that its concept of causality is drawn not simply 
in terms of workmanship but specifically in terms of 
craftsmanship. There need probably be no argument 
spent on the thesis that the sense of causality is, by and 
large, a particular manifestation of the sense of work¬ 
manship. But the sense of workmanship in its native 
scope apparently covers something more than the manual 
efficiency of the skilled workman simply. And in other 
times and under other cultural (technological) circum¬ 
stances the sense of workmanship has apparently given 
rise to concepts of causation of a wider, or at least of a 
looser, scope. In the naive rating of savage peoples work¬ 
manship appears to cover, perhaps uncertainly, notions 
of generation, nurture, tendance, and the like, without 
any sharp line being drawn between these various lines 
of effective endeavour on the one side and manual effi¬ 
ciency on the other. And so, on the other hand, in the 
cosmological knowledge (or quasi-knowledge) current 
among these peoples explanation in terms of genera¬ 
tion and growth are accepted as final along with ex¬ 
planations in terms of what the modern man would con¬ 
ceive to be the stricter sense of cause and effect. Even 
in the speculations of the sages of classical antiquity, 
and again in the cosmologies and natural history of the 
far-Oriental peoples, many questions of cause and effect 
are found to be sufficiently disposed of when worked out 


264 The Instinct of Workmanship 

in the like terms of generation, growth and quasi-physio- 
logical mutation. 

To modern inquiry explanations in these terms, other 
than those of physically effective work, are provisional 
at the best, and are held to only as awaiting a final 
solution in a materially, mechanistically competent way. 
And what is alone materially competent in the modern 
scientific apprehension is such an explanation as will 
make things plain in terms of matter and motion, working 
a change in the constitution of things by displacement 
through contact and pressure. Causation is conceived 
as manual work,—to use a French term, it is a remanie- 
ment of raw materials at hand. Physiological or chemical 
explanations must finally be recast in terms of physics, 
to satisfy the modern scientist’s sense of finality, and 
physics must be made to run in terms of impact, pressure, 
displacement in space, regrouping of material particles, 
coordinated movements and a shifting of equilibrium. 

Through all this runs the concomitant requirement of 
quantivalence, statable in statistical form. The scien¬ 
tist’s results are not finally merchantable, on the scien¬ 
tific exchange, until they have been reduced to such terms 
of accountancy as would be comprehensible to the man 
trained in the merchandising traffic of the petty trade, 
for whose conviction things must be punctiliously rated 
in exchange value. But, as has been noted above, it is 
only as an expedient of scientific accountancy that the 
facts under inquiry are kept account of in an itemised 
bill of values. This meticulous statistical accountancy 
is necessary to safeguard the accuracy of the work done 
and its conformity with the facts in hand; but the work 
so done handles these facts as active factors which go 


The Era of Handicraft 265 

efficiently to the production of the results observed. The 
cause is conceived to produce the effect, somewhat after 
the fashion in which a skilled workman produces a fin¬ 
ished article of trade. But when the scientist has set 
forth the operations and working conditions that have 
brought forth the effects which he is engaged in explain¬ 
ing, he must also, in order to the conviction of his fellow 
craftsmen, show a statistically itemised statement of 
receipts and expenditures covering the facts engaged,— 
in quantitative values he must show that the costs are 
balanced by the values that emerge in the finished pro¬ 
duct of that workmanlike process of causation whose 
recondite nature and course he has so laid bare to the 
light of understanding. 

This attempted characterisation of modern scientific 
inquiry and its working concepts applies immediately 
to the earlier phases and down to a date well past the 
advent of the machine industry,—so far past that date 
as to allow time and experience to work the new habits 
of thought peculiar to the machine technology into the 
texture of men’s preconceptions. In time, but tardily, 
as is the case with the pervasive effects of any new line 
of habituation, the discipline of the machine has wrought 
a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive, 
change in the aims and methods of science; a discussion 
of which is deferred until it comes up again in its connec¬ 
tion with the new technology. Less cogently and with 
qualifications, however, the above characterisation will 
apply to the later phases of modern science, as well as 
to that initial stage that marks the era of handicraft. 

Something further is due to be said of the cultural 


2 66 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


consequences of this discipline in workmanship during 
the era of handicraft, besides its guidance in the growth 
of technology and the related field of material science. As 
has been intimated above, habituation to the working 
conceptions of handicraft had much to do with that 
revision of the religious cult and its theological tenets 
that has shaped the spiritual life of modern times in 
contrast with the mediaeval life of faith. But it is an 
ungrateful, perhaps ungraceful, office to turn the dry 
light of matter-of-fact on the sacred verities, and a degree 
of parsimony will best be observed in any layman’s 
discussion of these intimate movements of the spirit. 
Yet it seems necessary to call to mind at least one point 
of singular concomitance between the state of the in¬ 
dustrial arts and fortunes of the Christian faith. 

Characteristic of modern times has been the Protestant 
rehabilitation of the cult and its tenets. In this rehabili¬ 
tation, which has not been without effect even within 
the Catholic church, much of the ancient spirit of sub¬ 
jection has been lost, replaced in part with a certain atti¬ 
tude of self-help and autonomy on the part of the laity. 
There is a degree of democratic initiative and a gild-like 
spirit of lay discretion in spiritual affairs. As already 
noted above, the tenets of the Faith have also in some 
degree been revised and reconstructed in terms consonant 
with the workmanlike conceptions of the handicraft 
system. -Such a protestant or quasi-protestant recon¬ 
struction of the cult and its tenets set in, as is well known, 
successively in the several leading countries of Europe, 
somewhat in the same order as these several countries 
successively advanced to a high level of technological 
and commercial enterprise. As noted above, in the south, 


The Era of Handicraft 267 

in the so-called Latin countries, this era of industrial 
and commercial enterprise was presently checked; the 
like being true in a less pronounced fashion for the peoples 
of Central Europe. Wherever the advance was seriously 
checked, so that the era of handicraft closed in collapse 
or reaction on its secular side, there the reconstruction 
of the religious cult also came to an incomplete issue at 
the most. So that by the definitive close of the era of 
handicraft those peoples of Christendom that had main¬ 
tained the advance achieved in this secular respect were 
also the ones that had accepted and continued to hold 
the revised form of the faith. Where this era of industrial 
and business enterprise closed in exhaustion and collapse, 
there the ancient form of the faith also triumphed over 
the heretics. It is, indeed, to be remarked as a sufficiently 
striking coincidence that even now the centre of diffusion 
of the modern industry is at the same time the centre of 
diffusion of religious protestantism and heresy. And the 
antique forms and fervour of the Faith are found in better 
preservation progressively outward from this centre of 
diffusion; and even in somewhat minute detail it appears 
to hold true not only that the more advanced industrial 
peoples are the less amenable to religious control and less 
given to superstitious observances of the archaic sort, 
but also that within these industrial countries the in¬ 
dustrial centres in the narrower sense of the word are 
less devout, or devout in a less archaic fashion, than 
the non-industrial population at large. Something of the 
kind, indeed, has been visibily true ever since a relatively 
early phase of the handicraft system; though nothing like 
undevoutness can be alleged of the industrial town 
population during the handicraft era proper. The hand- 


268 The Instinct of Workmanship 

icraft population was devout, but not consistently ortho¬ 
dox; and the industrial towns of that time were devout 
enough in their way, but it was in a way obnoxious to 
the received dogmas of the church. They were centres 
of devout heresy. It is only in late modern times that 
the malady has progressed so far that it may fairly be 
called a degree of apostacy. This concomitance be¬ 
tween technological mastery and religious dissent is 
doubtless susceptible of a good and serviceable explana¬ 
tion at the hands of the religious experts; it is here 
cited without prejudice as having at least a negative 
bearing on the question of how the discipline of the 
handicraft industry may be conceived to affect men’s 
spiritual attitude in a field so remote as that of the life 
of faith. 1 

What is known to economic history as the era of handi¬ 
craft is for the purposes of the political historian spoken 
of as the era of statemaking. The two designations may 
not cover precisely the same interval, but they coincide 
in a general way in point of dates, and the phenomena 
which have given rise to the two designations have much 
more than an accidental connection. It is not simply 
that the development of handicraft happens to fall in 
the same general period of history that is characterised 
by the dynastic wars that went to the making of the 
larger states. The growth of handicraft had much to 

1 In this connection it is worth noting, for what it may be worth, that 
there is a similarly rough concomitance between the diffusion of the blond 
racial stock in Europe and the modern forms of protestantism and re¬ 
ligious heresy. Whether this fact strengthens or weakens any argument 
that may be drawn from the concomitance of heresy and industry cited 
above may perhaps best be left an open question. 


269 


The Era of Handicraft 

do with making the large states practicable and with 
supplying the material means of large-scale warfare; 
while the traffic of dynastic politics in that time had in 
its turn very much to do with bringing that era of in¬ 
dustrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. 
The new industry supplied the sinews of war, and the 
wars ate up the substance of the industrial community. 

The new industry gave rise to a growth of industrial 
towns and commercial centres, primarily occupied by 
the traffic of the itinerant traders. One of the immediate 
consequences of this extension of merchandising enter¬ 
prise was the improvement of means of communication, 
both in the way of an extension and improvement of 
shipping—itself a technological fact—and in the way of 
improved routes of communication. A secondary con¬ 
sequence was a growth of population, coupled with its 
concentration in urban centres, together with a growth of 
wealth, in good part drawn together in the same centres. 
These changes enabled the powers in control to extend 
an effectual coercion over larger distances and over 
larger aggregations of population and wealth; it became 
practicable, mechanically, to swing a larger political 
aggregation and to hold it together in closer coordination 
than before. The physical conditions requisite to the 
formation and enduring maintenance of large political 
organisations were in this way supplied by the new in¬ 
dustrial era as an incidental result of its technological 
efficiency. 

More direct and obvious, though of no graver impor¬ 
tance, is the contribution made by the new technology 
to the means of coercion placed at the disposal of the 
warlords, in the way of improved weapons and armour, 


270 The Instinct of Workmanship 

defences and warlike appliances. The improvements 
worked out in the means of warfare during the early 
half of the era of handicraft exceed in material effect 
and in boldness of conception all the traceable improve¬ 
ments wrought in that line by all the warlike peoples of 
classical antiquity and all the fighting aggregations of 
Asia and Africa, from the beginning of the bronze age 
down to modern times. The craftsmen spent their 
best endeavours and their most brilliant ingenuity on 
this production of arms and munitions, with the result 
that these articles still lie over in the modern collections 
as the most finished productions of workmanship which 
that era has to show. The (unintended) result at large 
was that these improved appliances enabled the war¬ 
lords and their fighting men to control the industrial 
classes for their own ends and to levy exactions on trade 
and industry up to the limit of what the traffic would 
bear, or perhaps more commonly somewhat over that 
limit. It was, in this way, their own technological mas¬ 
tery that furnished the means of their own undoing, 
directly (mechanically speaking) and indirectly (in the 
resulting growth of warlike sentiment). 

That the craftsmen went so diligently into this pro¬ 
duction of ways and means for their own discomfort and 
abiding defeat is due not to any innately perverse bent 
of the sense of workmanship as it comes to expression 
in the spirit of the handicraft community, but rather to 
the exigencies created by the price system, with its prin¬ 
ciples of self-help,—a secondary, conventional product 
of the handicraft industry. As has been noted already, 
with perhaps tedious iteration, there runs through the 
handicraft community a highwrought spirit of individual 


The Era of Handicraft 


271 


self-sufficiency. So soon as the petty trade has grown 
to effective dimensions the individual workman comes 
into somewhat direct relations with the market, and 
except for the collective interest and action embodied in 
the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in little else 
than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little 
else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow crafts¬ 
men or to the community. It is the place of each to 
gain a livelihood by honest work through his own in¬ 
dividual skill and enterprise. Notoriously, the crafts¬ 
men were in effect lacking in that sense of solidarity 
that makes an efficient organisation for defence or of¬ 
fence; concerted action, outside the regulative activity 
of the gild, was to be had only with extreme difficulty 
on any other basis than individual pecuniary advantage. 
Each worked for himself, with an eye steadily to the 
main chance. And the main chance, from an early date 
in this era, meant gain in terms of price. So the crafts¬ 
man worked for such customers as would pay his price, 
and he spent his skill and ingenuity on such goods as 
were in demand. The trade in arms and weapons was 
good at that time. These appliances were a means of 
livelihood to the men at arms and a means of income 
and prestige to their princely employers. So the traffic 
went busily on, and the individual craftsmen put forth 
their best efforts toward enhancing the efficiency of the 
ruling and fighting classes, whose endeavours, without 
much collusion but by the inevitable drift of circumstance, 
converged on the subjection of the community of crafts¬ 
men at large and on the exhaustion of the community’s 
resources. 

Through its side issue in the commercial enterprise 



272 The Instinct of Workmanship 

which it fostered the handicraft industry brought to 
the hands of the politicians a further means of trouble. 
The trade brought on the price system, and so made it 
possible for ambitious princes to buy what they needed 
in their warlike negotiations; with funds in hand stores 
and munitions could be bought where they were needed, 
so enabling warlike operations to be carried on with 
greater facility at a greater distance than was feasible 
under the earlier rule of contributions in kind. The 
price system also enabled the warlords to hire merce¬ 
naries, and so to organise and maintain a standing force 
of skilled fighting men, mobile and irresponsible. But 
to hold one’s own in the competitive use of this new arm 
the prince must have funds; which led incontinently to 
all available manner of exactions on trade and com¬ 
merce, since it was from these sources almost solely 
that funds could be had. But it led also and equally 
to an increasing traffic between the princes and the 
captains of industry, for the use of funds. Funds had 
become the sinews of war, since the handicraft industry 
had come to turn out goods for sale and the merchandis¬ 
ing trade had made funds accessible in sufficient volume 
to be worth while. So the princes dealt with the captains 
of industry, selling what they could and hypothecating 
what they could not sell, in a competitive struggle to 
outdo one another at war and diplomacy. The game 
was then as always an emulative one, in which any ad¬ 
vantage was a differential advantage only. Hence the 
princes engaged, each and several, needed all the funds 
they could get the use of, and their need was ever present, 
not to be deferred. Hence they borrowed what they 

could and where they could, their borrowings being 

• •*“ * ^ « — 


The Era of Handicraft ’273 

floated by the help of all manner of expedients. Some 
of these fiscal expedients brought monopolistic advan¬ 
tage to the captains of industry, and so contributed to 
their further gain and to the concentration of wealth in 
fewer hands. Meantime, the princely chancelries, being 
in debt as far as possible, extorted further loans from 
the captains by seizure and by threats of bankruptcy; 
and whatever was borrowed was expeditiously used up 
in the destruction of property, population, industrial 
plant and international commerce. So, when all avail¬ 
able resources of revenue and credit, present and prospec¬ 
tive, had been exhausted, and all the accessible material 
had been consumed, the princely fisc went into bank¬ 
ruptcy, followed by its creditors, the captains of indus¬ 
try, followed by the business community at large with 
whose funds they had operated and by the industrial 
community, whose stock of goods and appliances was 
exhausted, whose trade connections were broken and 
whose working population had been debauched, scat¬ 
tered and reduced to poverty and subjection by the wars, 
revenue collectors and forced contributions. Meantime, 
too, habituation to the sentiments, ideals, standards 
and manner of life suitable to a state of predation had 
swamped the handicraft spirit and put abnegation and 
dependence on arbitrary power in the place of that 
initiative and pertinacious self-reliance that had made 
the era of handicraft. It was from this eventuality that 
England in great measure escaped by favour of her insu¬ 
lar position and the inability of her princes to draw a re¬ 
luctant industrial community into the traffic of dynastic 
intrigue that filled the Continent. 

It will have been remarked that one of the essential 


274 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


moves in this sequence of events, from the beginnings of 
handicraft in impecunious and self-reliant workman¬ 
ship to its eventual collapse in exhaustion, is the gradual 
accumulation of commercial and industrial wealth in 
relatively few hands. This accumulation of wealth, or 
rather its segregation in few hands, appears, as already 
indicated, to have entered as a potent factor in the course 
of things that lead the system of handicraft through 
maturity to collapse, as on the Continent, or to decay, 
as in England. It will accordingly be in place to go 
somewhat more narrowly into the circumstances of its 
beginnings and growth and the manner in which it 
plays its part in the organisation of the handicraft 
industry. 

It appears that this uneven distribution of wealth 
arises out of the technological exigencies of handicraft 
and of the petty trade which characteristically runs along 
with the handicraft industry in its early stages. 1 In its 
earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as known 
in mediaeval Europe was like its congener, the manual 
arts of the savage and lower barbarian peoples, in that 
the whole material equipment requisite to its pursuit 
consisted of a skilled workman and an extremely slender 
kit of tools. The tradition countenanced by historical 
students says that the beginnings of the handicraft sys¬ 
tem, with its specialised industry and trained workman¬ 
ship, is due to such workmen, possessed of substantially 
nothing but their own persons, who escaped in one way 
and another from the bonds of the manorial system, or 
its equivalent, and found shelter on sufferance near some 


1 See chapter v, above. 


The Era of Handicraft 


275 

feudal protector or religious corporation that found some 
advantage in this novel arrangement. 1 

On looking into this inchoate working arrangement 
between these masterless workmen and their patrons, 
and generalising the run of facts as may be permitted 
an inquiry that aims at theoretical presentation rather 
than historical description, the probable causal relation 
running through these obscure events will appear some¬ 
what as follows. It happened in Europe, as it has hap¬ 
pened now and again elsewhere, that the ownership of 
the soil in advanced feudal times took shape as a Landed 
Interest living at peace and under settled relations with 
the community from which they drew their livelihood 
and their means of controlling the community. Under 
these circumstances there grew up an ever-widening 
industrial system, under manorial auspices, in which the 
foremost place is taken by the mechanic arts, in the way 
of specialised crafts and mechanical processes and ap¬ 
pliances. The tranquil conditions that prevail under 
such a settled, pacific or sub-predatory scheme of con¬ 
trol bring out an increased volume of consumable pro¬ 
ducts, particularly since these same settled conditions 
admit a larger and more economical use of all industrial 
appliances. The immediate consequence is that an in¬ 
creased net product accrues to the propertied class; 
which calls them to an intensified consumption of goods; 
which requires increased elaboration and diversity of 
products; which calls for an increasing diversity and 
volume of appliances and more prolonged and elaborate 
technological processes. The needs of the propertied 

1 Cf. Ashley, English Economic History and Theory , bk. i, ch. i; Karl 
Bucher, Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, ch. iii. 


27 6 The Instinct of Workmanship 

4ljV. 

class, particularly in the way of superfluities, reach such 
a degree of diversity that it is no longer practicable to 
supply these needs by specialised work within the in¬ 
dustrial framework of the manor or its equivalent. The 
itinerant trade comes in to help out in this difficult pas¬ 
sage by bringing exotic luxuries, curious articles of great 
price; but that is not sufficient to cover the require¬ 
ments of the case, since there is much needed work of 
elaboration that cannot be taken care of by way of an 
importation of finished goods. 

Here comes the opportunity of the skilled masterless 
workman. The growth of wealth has provided a place 
for him in the economy of the time, and having once 
got a foothold he and his followers congregate in indus¬ 
trial towns and find a living by the work of their hands. 

The point should be kept in mind in any consideration 
of the era of handicraft that its beginnings are made by 
these “masterless men/’ who broke away (or were 
broken out) from the bonds of that organisation in which 
the arbitrary power of the landed interest held dominion. 
By tenacious assertion of the personal rights which they 
so arrogated to themselves, and at great cost and risk, 
they made good in time their claim to stand as a clasc 
apart, a class of ungraded free men among whom self- 
help and individual workmanlike efficiency were the 
accepted grounds of repute and of livelihood. This 
tradition never died out among the organised craftsmen 
until the industrial system which had so been inaugu¬ 
rated went under in the turmoil of politics and finance 
or was supplanted by the machine era that grew out of 
it. With this class-tradition of initiative and democratic 
autonomy is associated, as an integral fact in the system, 


The Era of Handicraft 277 

the concomitant tradition that work is a means of liveli¬ 
hood. 

In these early phases of the system the individual 
workman is (typically) competent to work out his liveli¬ 
hood with the use of such a slight equipment of tools as 
could readily be acquired in the course of his employ¬ 
ment. In great part, indeed, the craftsman of the early 
days made his tools and appliances as he went along. 
But it follows necessarily that further training in the 
skilled manipulations of the crafts led to the use of im¬ 
proved and specialised tools as well as to the use of larger 
appliances useful in the technological processes em¬ 
ployed, such as could scarcely be called tools in the sim¬ 
pler sense of the word but would rather be classed as 
Industrial plant. With the advance of technology the: 
material equipment so requisite to the pursuit of indus¬ 
try in the crafts increases in volume, cost and elabora¬ 
tion, and the processes of industry grow extensive and 
complex; until it presently becomes a matter of serious 
difficulty for any workman single-handed to supply the 
complement of tools, appliances and materials with 
which his work is to be done. It then also becomes a 
matter of some moment to own such wealth. 

As under any earlier and simpler industrial regime, so 
in this early-advanced phase of the handicraft system 
the workman must also have command of that imma¬ 
terial equipment of technological information at large 
that is current in the community, in so far as it affects 
his particular occupation; and he must in addition ac¬ 
quire the special trained skill necessary in his own branch 
of craft. The former he will, at that stage of technologi¬ 
cal growth, still come by without particular deliberate 


278 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


application, in the ordinary routine of life; it is made up 
of general information and familiarity with current ways 
of doing, simply, and on the level of general information 
which then prevailed no special training or schooling 
seems to have been needed to place the young man 
abreast of his time. In other words, the common stock 
of technological knowledge had not by that time grown 
so unwieldy as to require special pains to assimilate it. 
As for the latter, the special skill which would make 
him a craftsman, that was also accessible at the cost of 
some application; but under the rules of handicraft the 
early apprentice gained this trained skill at no cost 
beyond application to the work in hand. But the like 
does not continue to hold true of the material equip¬ 
ment; which presently was no longer to be compassed 
as a matter of course and of routine application to the 
work in hand. It was becoming increasingly important 
and increasingly difficult to be provided with these 
means with which to go to work, and the ownership of 
such means gave an increasingly decisive advantage to 
their owner. 

What adds further force to this posture of affairs is 
the fact that in many of the crafts the work could no 
longer be carried on to full advantage in strict severalty; 
the best approved processes required a gang or corps of 
workmen in cooperation, and required also something in 
the way of a “plant” suitable for the employment of 
such a corps rather than of a single individual. Such a 
condition, of course, came on earlier and more urgently 
in some crafts, as, e. g., in tanning, or brewing, or some 
of the metal-working trades, than in others, as, e. g., 
the building trades, locksmithing, cobbling, etc. But 


The Era of Handicraft 279 

an advance of this kind, and the exigencies which such 
an advance brings, came on gradually and with such a 
measure of general prevalence through the crafts that 
the general statement made above may fairly stand as 
a free characterisation of the state of the industrial arts 
in the crafts at large at the period in question. The 
growing resort to working methods requiring organised 
groups of workmen together with something in the way 
of collective industrial plant would greatly hasten the 
concentration of the ownership of the material equip¬ 
ment. Ownership in all ages is individual ownership; 
and then as ever any single item of property, such as a 
workshop and its appliances, would presently fall into 
the possession of an individual owner. The owners of 
the plant became employers of their impecunious fellow 
craftsmen and so came into a position to dispose of their 
working capacity and their product. 

When and in so far as the advanced state of the in¬ 
dustrial arts, therefore, made it impracticable for the 
individual craftsman readily to acquire the material 
means for work in his craft, any proficiency in the craft 
would be of no effect except by arrangement with some 
one who could supply these material means. The pos¬ 
session of the material equipment, therefore, placed in 
the discretion of its owners the utilisation of such tech¬ 
nological knowledge and skill as the members of the 
given crafts might possess. The usufruct of the handi¬ 
craft community’s technological proficiency in this way 
came to vest in the owners of the plant, in the same 
measure as this plant was necessary to the pursuit of 
industry under the technological scheme then in force. 
This effect would be had so soon and in such measure as 


28 o 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


it became a matter of appreciable difficulty to acquire 
and maintain the material equipment requisite to the 
workmanlike pursuit of industry; and it would become 
generally decisive of the relation between master and 
workman so soon as the outfit of material means required 
for effective work had grown larger than the common 
run of workmen could acquire in the course of such 
training as would fit them to do the work in the par¬ 
ticular branch of industry in which they engaged. 

The change brought on in this way by the growth of 
technology was neither abrupt nor sharply defined. Like 
other changes in the technological scheme it was an out¬ 
growth of the knowledge and methods already previously 
current, and it took effect in detail and in a very concrete 
way, leading on through fluctuating usage to a gradually 
settled general practice -which came at length to differ 
substantially from the situation out of which it had 
grown. By insensible gradations it came into such 
general prevalence and everyday recognition, and estab¬ 
lished such stable methods of procedure, as presently left 
it standing as an established institutional fact. It grew 
into the prevalent habits of thought without a visible 
break, and made its way more or less thoroughly in the 
several branches of industry which it touched, until it 
came to be accepted as the type of handicraft organisa¬ 
tion to which other, outlying branches of industry would 
then also tend to conform, even wffien there was no direct 
provocation for these outlying members of the industrial 
system to take on the typical form so given. But given 
the tranquil conditions necessary to the accumulation 
of such industrial appliances and to the invention and 
employment of long and roundabout processes in indus- 


28 i 


The Era of Handicraft 

try, and the resulting change that sets in will be of a 
cumulative character, affecting an ever increasing pro¬ 
portion of the industrial arts, and permeating the indus¬ 
trial system at large in a progressive fashion. 

Under these circumstances, and in proportion as these 
technological exigencies take effect in one branch of 
industry and another, the usufruct of the industrial 
community’s current productive efficiency comes to vest 
effectually in those who own the material means of in¬ 
dustry. Their effectual exploitation of the community’s 
industrial efficiency will extend to such industries, and 
with such a degree of thoroughness and security, as 
the state of the industrial arts may decide. This effec¬ 
tual engrossing of the technological heritage by the 
owners will extend to any branch of the industrial arts 
in which so considerable a material equipment is re¬ 
quired, in appliances and raw materials, that the work¬ 
men who go into this given line of employment cannot 
practically create or acquire it as they go along. In an 
uncertain measure, therefore, and varying in degree 
somewhat from one industry to another, the owner of 
the plant becomes in effect the owner of the community’s 
technological knowledge and workmanlike skill, and 
thereby the owner of the workman’s productive capacity. 

In the small beginnings of the handicraft industry the 
craftsman typically passed by a simple routine from 
the status of apprentice to that of master, picking up 
the slight necessary outfit as he went along; in the closing 
phases of the era handicraft methods had reached a high 
degree of specialisation and made use of extensive pro¬ 
cesses and appliances, and it was then only by exception 
that any craftsman could pass from apprenticeship 


282 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


through the intervening stages to the position of a work¬ 
ing master, without the help of inherited means or special 
favour. Toward the close of the era the masters were, 
typically, employers of skilled labour and foremen in 
their own shop, except in the frequent case where they 
altogether ceased to work at the trade and gave their 
whole attention to the business side of the industry. 
Many of these nominal master craftsmen were in fact 
mere traders, captains of industry, businessmen, who 
never came in manual contact with the work . 1 

So capitalism emerged from the working of the handi¬ 
craft system, through the increasing scale and efficiency 
of technology. And on the ground afforded by this 
capitalistic phase of the system arose that era of business 
enterprise that ruled the economic fortunes of Europe 
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its captains 
of industry and great financial houses. Whether the 
large means with which these captains of industry oper¬ 
ated were primarily drawn from the gains of the petty 
trade that had gone before, or were drawn into this field 
of business from outside, is a debated question which 
need not detain the present inquiry. The fact remains 
that, by whatever means, this development of the situa¬ 
tion comes out of that growth of handicraft whereby 
the ownership and control of the industrial plant passed 
out of the hands of the body of working craftsmen. 

When this business situation collapsed, therefore, as 
already spoken of above, the handicraft industry at its 
best was organised on capitalistic lines and managed for 
capitalistic ends,—with a view to profits on investment, 
not primarily with a view to the livelihood of the working 
1 Cf. R. Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger. 


The Era of Handicraft ^283 

craftsmen. The new situation which then presented it¬ 
self, as a consequence of the collapse of the business com¬ 
munity, was industrially and commercially better suited 
to the simpler and ruder methods of handicraft that had 
succeeded in the early days of the system; but the current 
preconceptions and trade relations that actually ruled at 
the time were of a capitalistic kind, and the current 
state of the industrial arts, even where industry had 
fallen into a fragmentary state, was such as technologic¬ 
ally required the large-scale organisation in order to its 
due working. Between the impossibility of going for¬ 
ward on the accustomed lines and the impracticability 
of an effectual rehabilitation of more primitive methods, 
there resulted a period of poverty and confusion, helped 
out by the continued mismanagement of the dynastic 
politicians; so that the industrial situation of the Con¬ 
tinent never recovered until it was overtaken by the new 
era of the machine industry inaugurated by the English. 

The circumstances of life for the common man under¬ 
went more than one substantial change during the era 
of handicraft, and these changes were not all in the 
same sense. The dominant note changes from work¬ 
manship in the earlier phases of the era to pecuniary 
competition and political anxiety toward the close, par¬ 
ticularly as regards the industrial communities of the 
Continent. The era is a long period of history, all told, 
running over some five or six centuries, from an advanced 
stage of the feudal age to the eighteenth century, or to 
various earlier dates in those countries where the handi¬ 
craft system came to a provisional close in the era of 
statemaking; and the discipline of life does not run to 


284 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


the same effect in the earlier of these phases of the de¬ 
velopment as in the later. Not that handicraft ceased 
to be the prevailing method in the mechanical industries 
of these countries when the reaction overtook them, but 
the technological advance had been seriously checked, 
and such handicraft industry as still went on had ceased 
to dominate the economic situation and no longer held 
the primacy among the factors that shaped the life of 
the communities in question. Its place as a dominant 
force was taken by the new political interests and by 
such commercial enterprise as still went on. 

But through the centuries of its earlier growth the 
handicraft industry, simply as a routine of workman¬ 
ship, shaped the conditions of life for the common people 
more pervasively and consistently than any other one 
factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted dura¬ 
tion and touched the current habits of thought in an 
intimate and enduring fashion; so as to leave a large 
and enduring effect on the institutions of the peoples 
among whom it prevailed. The English-speaking com¬ 
munity shows these effects in a larger measure and a more 
evident manner than any other,—visible only in a less 
degree in the Low Countries, and more equivocally in the 
Scandinavian countries. These peoples had not been 
subjected to the handicraft discipline for a longer time 
or in a more exacting fashion than their Continental 
neighbours, but they had on the other hand escaped the 
full measure of the political activity of the era of state¬ 
making that did so much to neutralise the effects of the 
handicraft system in the larger Continental countries. 

Something has been said above of the way in which the 


The Era of Handicraft 


285 


discipline of life under the rule of handicraft shaped and 
coloured men’s thinking in those materialistic sciences 
whose early growth runs parallel with the technological 
advance in modern times. It has also been evident that 
this training in the manner of conceiving things for the 
purposes of technology wrought certain broad changes 
in the theological and philosophical conceptions that 
guided the inquiring spirits of the same and subsequent 
generations. This effect wrought by the routine of life 
under the handicraft system on scientific and philo¬ 
sophical conceptions is of a very pervasive character, 
being of the nature of an habitual bent, an attitude or 
frame of mind, whose characteristic mark is the accept¬ 
ance of creative workmanship as a finality. It became 
an element of common sense in the apprehension of 
thoughtful men whose frame of mind was formed under 
the traditions of that era that creative workmanship is 
an ultimate, irreducible factor in the constitution of 
things, accepted as a matter of course and used unspar¬ 
ingly and with ever-growing conviction as a terminus a 
quo and ad quern . 1 

Creative workmanship, fortified in ever-growing meas¬ 
ure by the conception of serviceability to human use, 
works its way gradually into the central place in the 
theoretical speculations of the time, so that by the close 
of the era it dominates all intellectual enterprise in the 
thoughtful portions of Christendom. Hence it becomes 
not only the instrument of inquiry in the sciences, but a 

1 Seen, as indicated above, in the matter-of-course resort of the scien¬ 
tists to the conception of efficient cause as a solvent of problems touching 
material phenomena, as well as in the theologians' and philosophers’ 
resistless drift toward creative efficiency as the ultimate term of their 
speculations. 


286 The Instinct of Workmanship 

i 

major premise in all work of innovation and reconstruc¬ 
tion of the scheme of institutions. In that extensive 
revision of the institutional framework that charac¬ 
terises modern times it is the life of the common people, 
their rights and obligations, that is forever in view, and 
their life is conceived in terms of craftsmanlike industry 
and the petty trade. By and large, the outcome of this 
revision of civil and legal matters under handicraft aus¬ 
pices is the system of Natural Rights, including the con¬ 
cept of Natural Liberty. The whole scheme so worked 
out is manifestly of the same piece with that Order of Na¬ 
ture and Natural Law that dominated the inquiries of 
the scientists and the speculations of the philosophers. 

It lies in the nature of the case that the English-speak¬ 
ing community should take the lead in the final advance 
in all these matters and should work out the most 
finished, secure and enduring results within these pre¬ 
mises, both in the field of scientific inquiry and in that 
of the theory of institutions. It lies in the nature of the 
case because the English-speaking community had the 
benefit of the technological gains made before their 
time, because they had a long and passably uneventful 
experience of the handicraft routine in industry and in 
the workday life to whose wants the handicraft industry 
ministered, and because the discipline of the handicraft 
era was not in their case neutralised in its closing phase 
by the turmoil, insecurity and civic debaucheries of an 
epoch of war and political intrigue. And here again the 
neighbouring peoples come into the case as copartners in 
this work with England in much the same measure in 
which their experience through this period was of the 
same general nature. 


The Era of Handicraft 


287 


The scheme of Natural Rights, and of Natural Liberty, 
which so emerges is of a pronounced individualistic 
tenor, as it should be to answer to the scheme of ex¬ 
perience embodied in the system of handicraft. In the 
crafts, particularly during the protracted early phases 
of the system, it is the individual workman, working 
for a livelihood by use of his own personal force, dex¬ 
terity and diligence, that stands out as the main fact; 
so much so, indeed, that he appears to have stood, in the 
apprehension of his time, as the sole substantial factor 
in the industrial organisation. Similarly under the canon 
of Natural Liberty the individual is thrown on his own 
devices for his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. 
The craftsman by immemorial custom traditionally dis¬ 
posed of his work and its product as he chose, under the 
rules of his gild. He was by prescription in full posses¬ 
sion of what he made, subject only to the gild regula¬ 
tions imposed for the good of his neighbours who were 
similarly placed. The most sacred right included in the 
scheme of Natural Rights is that of property in what¬ 
ever wealth has been honestly acquired, subject only to 
the qualification that it must not be turned to the detri¬ 
ment of one’s fellows. In the days of the typical handi¬ 
craft system the petty trade runs along with the handi¬ 
craft industry, in such a way that every master crafts¬ 
man is more or less of a trader, disposing of his goods or 
services in plenary discretion, and even the apprentices 
and journeymen similarly bargain for their terms of 
work and at times for the disposal of their product; while 
the professional itinerant trader is a member of this 
industrial community on much the same footing as the 
craftsmen proper. So it is a secure item in the scheme 


288 The Instinct of Workmanship 

of Natural Rights that all persons not under tutelage 
have an indefeasible right to dispose by purchase and 
sale not only of products of their own hands but of what¬ 
ever items they have come by through alienation by 
its producer or lawful owner. And ownership is in nat¬ 
ural-rights theory always to be traced back to the crea¬ 
tive workmanship of its first possessor. 1 

In the sequel this natural right freely to dispose of 
one’s person and work, when it had found lodgment 
among the principles of civil rights in the eighteenth 
century, contributed substantially to the dissolution of 
that organ of surveillance and control that the craftsmen 
of an earlier generation had instituted in the gild system. 
The case is but an instance of what is continually hap¬ 
pening and bound to happen in the field of institutional 
growth. Institutional principles, such as this item of 
civil rights, emerge from use and wont, resulting as a 
settled line of convention from usage and custom that 
grow out of the exigencies of life at the time. But use 
and wont is a matter of time. It takes time for habitua¬ 
tion to attain that secure degree of conventional recog¬ 
nition and authenticity that will enable it to stand as 
an indefeasible principle of conduct, and by the time 
this consummation is achieved it commonly happens 
that the exigencies which enforced the given line of use 
and wont have ceased to be operative, or at least to 

1 Cf. Locke, Of Civil Government , ch. v, “Though the earth and all in¬ 
ferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in 
his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labour of 
his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. What¬ 
soever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and 
left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is 
his own, and thereby makes it his property.” 


289 


The Era of Handicraft 

- /ft,. v 

be so imperative as in their earlier incidence. The con¬ 
trol which the gilds were initially designed to exercise 
was a control that should leave the gildsmen free in the 
pursuit of their work, subject only to a salutary surveil¬ 
lance and standardisation of the output, such as would 
maintain the prestige of their workmanship and facilitate 
the disposal of the goods produced. The initial purpose 
seems, in modern phrase, to have been a creation of in¬ 
tangible assets for the benefits of the body of gildmen. 
Under the new conditions that came to prevail when 
capitalistic management took over the direction of in¬ 
dustry these gild regulations no longer served their pur¬ 
pose, but they seem on the contrary to have become an 
obstacle to the free employment of skilled workmen. 

A similar fortune was about the same time beginning 
to overtake this principle of Natural Liberty itself, and 
that even in the particular bearing which seems at the 
outset to have been its primary and most substantial 
aim. Initially, it seems, the point of interest, and indeed 
of contention, was the freedom of the masterless work¬ 
man to dispose of his person and workmanship as he saw 
fit and as he best could and would,—to take care of his 
life, liberty and pursuit of happiness without let or 
hindrance from persons vested with authority or prerog¬ 
ative. With the passage of time, use and wont erected 
this conventional rule into an inalienable right. But 
included with it, as an integral extension of the powers 
which this inalienable right safeguarded, was the right 
of purchase and sale, touching both work and its prod¬ 
uct, the right freely to hold and dispose of property. 
Presently, toward the close of the handicraft era, or 
more specifically in the late eighteenth century in Eng- 


290 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


land, industry fell under capitalistic management. When 
this change had taken passably full effect the workman 
was already secure in his civil (natural) right to dispose 
of his workmanship as he thought best, but the circum¬ 
stances of employment under capitalistic management 
made it impossible for him in fact to dispose of his work 
except to these employers, and very much on their terms, 
or to dispose of his person except where the exigencies 
of their business might require him. And the similarly 
inalienable right of ownership, which had similarly 
emerged from use and wont under the handicraft sys¬ 
tem, but which now in effect secured the capitalist- 
employer in his control of the material means of indus¬ 
try,—this sacred right of property now barred out any 
move that might be designed to reinstate the workman 
in his effective freedom to work as he chose or to dispose 
of his person and product as he saw fit. 

The connection so shown between the growth of handi¬ 
craft and the system of Natural Rights does not purport 
to be a complete account of the rise of that system, even 
in outline. The more usual account traces this system 
to the concept of jus naturale, of the late Roman jurists. 
There is assuredly no call here to question or disparage 
the work of those jurists and scholars who have busied 
themselves with authenticating the system of Natural 
Rights by showing it to be founded in the jus gentium 
and the jus naturale of the Latin Codes. Their work is 
doubtless historically exact and competent. But as is 
commonly the case with such work at the hands of 
jurists and scholars, especially in that past age, it con¬ 
tents itself with tracing an authentic pedigree, rather 
than go into questions of the causes that led to the vogue 



The Era of Handicraft 


2Q1 

of these concepts at the time of their acceptance or the 
circumstances which gave these Natural Rights that par¬ 
ticular scope and content which they have assumed in 
modern theory of law and civil relations. The thesis 
which is here offered is to the effect that the habituation 
of use and wont under the handicraft system installed 
these rights, in an inchoate fashion, in the current pre¬ 
conceptions of the community, and that this habituation 
is traceable, causally rather than by process of ratiocina¬ 
tion, to the sense of workmanship as it took form and 
went into action under the particular conventional cir¬ 
cumstances of the early era of handicraft; that the pre¬ 
conceptions that so went into effect determined the 
current attitude of thoughtful men toward questions of 
civil rights and legal principle; and that the jurists who 
had occasion to take notice of these current preconcep¬ 
tions touching human rights found themselves con¬ 
strained to deal with them as elementary facts in the 
situation as it lay before them, and therefore to find a 
ground for them in the accepted canons, such as would 
satisfy the legal mind of their authenticity by ancient 
prescription, or such as should determine the scope of 
their application in conformity with legal principles 
having a prior claim and authoritative sanction. The 
thesis, therefore, is not that the jurists founded these 
modern principles of legal theory on the popular pre¬ 
judices current in their time and due in point of habitua¬ 
tion to the routine of handicraft, nor that they stretched 
the ancient principles oijus naturale to meet the demands 
of popular prejudice, but that on prompting of legal 
exigencies to which the practical acceptance of these 
principles had given rise, the jurists found in the capita 


2g2 The Instinct of Workmanship 

laries of the code wn<*t was necessary to authenticate 
these principles of legal theory and give them the sanc¬ 
tion of authority,—a work of reasoning all the more con¬ 
genial and convincing to the jurists since they in common 
with the rest of their generation were by habit and tradi¬ 
tion imbued with the penchant to find these principles 
right and good, and consequently to find none other in 
the codes that might fatally traverse those whose au¬ 
thentication was due. But these are matters of pedigree, 
and this work of the great jurists and philosophers is in 
great part of the nature of accessory after the fact, so far 
as bears on that sweeping acceptance of these principles 
and that incontestable efficiency that marks the course 
of their life-history in modern times. The jurists and 
philosophers have sought and shown the sufficient rea¬ 
son for accepting this scheme of principles, as well as 
for the particular fashion in which they have been formu¬ 
lated; but the insensible growth of habits of thought 
induced by the conditions of life in (early) modern times 
must be allowed to stand as the efficient cause of their 
dominant control over modern practice, speculation, and 
sentiment touching all those relations that have been 
standardised in their terms. By use and wont the range 
of conventional elements included in the scheme had 
become eternal and indubitable principles of right reason, 
ingrained in the intellectual texture of the jurists as well 
as in their lay contemporaries; and the task of the jurists 
therefore was to work out their authentication in terms 
of sufficient reason; it was not for them to trouble with 
any question of the causes to which these principles 
owed their eternal fitness in the scheme of Nature at that 
particular time. 


The Era of Handicraft 


293 


The Natural Rights which so found authentication 
at the hands of the jurists were of the individualistic 
kind which the discipline of the handicraft system had 
inculcated, and the authentication found in the jus 
naturale does not range much beyond the individualistic 
bounds so prescribed, nor are other lines of ancient pre¬ 
scription, at variance with these rights, brought at all 
prominently into the light by the legal inquiries of the 
jurists. Whereas it is no matter of serious question that 
the chief bearing of the ancient findings embodied in 
the code is not of this individualistic character. The 
causes which brought on the modern acceptance of this 
scheme of Natural Rights are a matter of use and wont, 
quite distinct from that line of argument by which the 
jurists established them on grounds of sufficient reason 
resting on ancient prescription. 

The extreme tenacity of life shown by the system of 
Natural Rights may raise a reasonable doubt as to the 
adequacy of any account that assigns their derivation 
to the discipline of use and wont peculiar to any par¬ 
ticular cultural era, even when the era in question is of 
so consistent a character and such protracted duration 
as the era of handicraft. What adds force to such a ques¬ 
tion is the fact that something like these preconceptions 
of natural right is not uncommon in the lower cultures. 
So that on the face of the returns there appears to be 
good ground in the nature of things for designating these 
conventional rights “natural.” Something of the kind 
is current in an obvious fashion among the peaceable 
communities on the lower levels of culture, among whom 
the scheme of accepted rights and obligations bears 
more than a distant resemblance to the Natural Rights 


294 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


of the eighteenth century. But something of the kind 
will also be found among peoples on a higher level, both 
peaceable and predatory; though departing more notably 
in point of contents from the eighteenth-century system. 
The point of similarity, or of identity, among all these 
systems of conventionally fundamental and eternal 
human rights is to be found in their intrinsic sanction—■ 
they are all and several right and good as a matter of 
course and of common sense; the point of divergence or 
dissimilarity is to be found in the contents of the code, 
which are not nearly the same in all cases. In the me¬ 
diaeval natural common-sense scheme of rights, prerog¬ 
ative, personal and class exemption, is of the essence of 
the canon; but the scheme is none the less intrinsically 
mandatory on those who had been bred into a matter-of- 
course acceptance of it by the routine of life in that age. 
Differential rights, duties and privilege give the point 
of departure in this mediaeval system of civil relations; 
whereas in the system worked out under the auspices of 
the handicraft industry the denial of differential ad¬ 
vantage, whether class or individual, is the beginning of 
wisdom and the substance of common sense as applied 
to civil relations. The one of these schemes comes out 
of an economic situation drawn on lines of predation, 
ancient, prescriptive and settled, and its first principle 
is that of master and servant; the other comes of a situa¬ 
tion grounded in workmanlike efficiency, and its first 
principle is that of an equitable livelihood for work done. 

That some of the working systems of civil rights in 
customary force among the peaceable communities of 
the lower culture have more in common with modern 
Natural Rights than this mediaeval scheme, should logic- 


The Era of Handicraft 


295 

ally be due to a similarity in the conditions of life out of 
which they have arisen. In these savage or lower bar¬ 
barian communities, too, the principle of organization is 
work for a livelihood, and the conventional ground of 
economic relations is that of workmanship, as it is under 
the early handicraft system; but with the difference that 
whereas the technology of handicraft throws the skilled 
workman into perspective as a self-sufficient individual, 
and so throws self-help into the foreground as the prin¬ 
ciple of economic equity, among these savages and lower 
barbarians living by means of a technology of a less highly 
specialised character; with a material situation not ad¬ 
mitting of the same degree of severalty in work or liveli¬ 
hood, the prime requisite in the relations governing the 
rights and duties of the members of the group is not the 
individual livelihood of the skilled workman but that of 
the group at large. The individual’s personal claims 
come in only as secondary and subservient to the needs of 
the group at large; rights of ownership are loose and 
vague, and they lack that tenacity of life that char¬ 
acterises the like rights under the handicraft system. It 
is true, the product of industry belongs primarily to the 
producer of it, it is his in some sense that might pass into 
ownership if the technological situation admitted of work 
for a livelihood in strict and consistent severalty; but in 
the actual case as found on these lower levels the product 
commonly escapes somewhat easily from his individual 
possession and comes to inure to the use of the group. 
Except for such articles as continue to pertain to him by 
virtue of intimate and daily use, the producer’s posses¬ 
sive control of his product is likely at the best to be 
transient and dubious, readily giving way before any 


296 The Instinct of Workmanship 

urgent call for its use by other members of the 
group. 1 

A fact of some incisive effect in this connection is 
doubtless the characteristic trait of handicraft that, in 
its early phases wholly and obviously and in its later 
development also somewhat evidently, it was the affair 
of a class; whereas in the savage communities with which 
it is here compared, the technology and the livelihood in 
question are those of the community at large, not of a 
class that stands in contrast and in some degree of com¬ 
petition with the community at large. The craftsmen 
were a fraction of the community by work for whose 
needs they got their livelihood, even though, in the 
course of time, they became the dominant element within 
the local community (municipality) whose fortunes they 
shared. And as between this fraction of the population 
and outside classes with whom they carried on their 
traffic, particularly the well-to-do and land-holding 
classes, there could be no constraining sense of a soli¬ 
darity of interest. The ancient bond of master and serv¬ 
ant had been broken by something like an overt act of 
class secession on the part of the craftsmen, and nothing 
like a bond of fellowship had taken its place. The fel¬ 
lowship ran within the lines of craftsmanship, while the 
traffic of each craftsman typically ran across the line 
that divided the craftsman from the old order and popula¬ 
tion outside of this industrial system. 

1 Illustrative instances of such a customary code of “natural” rights 
and obligations are numerous in the late literature of ethnology. Good 
illustrations are afforded by various papers in the Reports of the Am. 
Bureau of Ethnology, on the culture of the Pueblos, Eskimo, and the 
Indians of the North-West Coast; so also in Skeat and Blagden, Pagan 
Races of the Malay Peninsula , or in Seiigmann, The Veddas . 


The Era of Handicraft 297 

That the eighteenth-century system of Natural Rights 
shows such a degree of approximation to the scheme of 
rights and obligations observed among many primitive 
peoples need flutter no one’s sense of cultural consistency. 
Return to Nature was more or less of a password in the 
closing period of the era of handicraft and after, and in 
respect of this system of civil relations it appears that 
the popular attitude of that time was in effect something 
of a reversion to primitive habits of thought; though it 
was at best a partial return to a “state of nature,” in 
the sense of a state of peace and industry rather than a 
return to the unsophisticated beginnings of society. 
That such a partial reversion takes effect in the habits 
of thought of the time appears to be due to a similarly 
partial return to somewhat analogous habits of life. 
The correspondence in the habits of thought is no greater 
than that in the habits of life out of which these habits 
of thought emerged. The primitive peoples that show 
this suggestive resemblance to the system of Natural 
Rights typically are living under a routine of workman¬ 
ship and in a state of habitual peace,—in these respects 
being placed somewhat similarly to the handicraft com¬ 
munity. The handicraft system comes true to the same 
characterisation in so far that it was dominated by a 
routine of workmanship and so far as, in effect, its life- 
history falls in an era of prevailingly peaceable condi¬ 
tions; and such a characterisation holds true of the in¬ 
dustrial community proper through the period during 
which handicraft is the ruling factor in the community’s 
habitual range of interest. It is not that the era of 
handicraft was an era of reversion to savagery, but only 
that the tone-giving factor in the community of that 


298 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


time reverted, by force of the state of the industrial arts, 
to habits of peace and industry, in which direct and de¬ 
tailed manual work takes a leading place. There is also 
the further point of economic contact with the savage 
state that in the handicraft community distinctions of 
wealth are neither large nor of decisive consequence 
during the long period of habituation that brought the 
preconceptions of that era into the settled shape that 
gave them the character of a finished and balanced sys¬ 
tem of principles. 

It may be added, at the risk of tedious repetition, 
that the habits of life characteristic of the era, as well as 
the frame of mind suited to this characteristic routine 
of life, seem peculiarly suited to the native endowment 
of the European peoples,—perhaps in an especial degree 
suited to the native bent of those sections of the popula¬ 
tion in which there is an appreciable admixture of the 
dolicho-blond stock. That such may be the case is at 
least strongly suggested by the tenacious hold which 
this system of Rights apparently still has on the senti¬ 
mental allegiance of these Western peoples, after the 
conditions to which these Rights owe their rise, and to 
which they are suited, have in the main ceased to exist; 
as well as by the somewhat blind fervour with which these 
peoples, and more especially the English-speaking section 
of them, go about the idyllic enterprise of rehabilitating 
that obsolescent “competitive system” that embodied 
the system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the 
era of handicraft and went under in its dissolution. 


CHAPTER VII 

The Machine Industry 

The era of the machine industry has been designated 
variously, to answer to the varying point of view from 
which it has been considered by divers writers. As an 
historical era it shows divers traits, more or less charac¬ 
teristic, and it has been designated by one or another of 
these traits according to the particular line of interest 
that may have directed the attention of those who have 
had occasion to name it. It is spoken of as the era of 
the factory system, of large-scale industry, as the age 
of Capitalism or of free competition, or again as an era 
of the credit economy. But as seen from the point of 
view of technology, and more specifically from that of 
workmanship as it underlies the technological system, 
it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, 
or of the machine process. As a technological period 
it is commonly conceived to take its rise in the British 
industrial community about the third quarter of the 
eighteenth century, the conventional date of the Indus¬ 
trial Revolution,—those who have a taste for precise 
dates assigning it more specifically to the sixties of that 
century, to coincide with the earliest practical use of 
certain large mechanical inventions of that age. 1 

Such a precise date is scarcely serviceable for any other 

1 Cf., e. g., C. Beard, The Industrial Revolution, ch. ii; Spencer Walpole, 
History of England from 1815, vol. i; C. W. Taylor, The Modern Factory 
System, ch. i, ii. 


299 


300 The Instinct of Workmanship 

than a mnemonic purpose. If the matter is taken in 
historical perspective the era of the machine process 
will be seen to have been coming on in England through 
the earlier years of the century, and even from before 
that time; whereas notable mechanical inventions, and 
engineering exploits of the like general bearing in tech¬ 
nology, had begun to affect the industrial situation in 
some of the Continental countries at an appreciably 
earlier period. So, e. g ., practical improvements had 
gone into effect in water-wheels, pumps and wind mills, 
in the use of sails and the designs of shipping, in wheeled 
vehicles (though the early modern improvements in 
this particular may easily be over-rated) and in such 
appliances as chimneys; and, again, there is the peculiar 
but highly instructive field of applied mechanics repre¬ 
sented by the invention and improvement of firearms. 
Such engineering enterprises as the drainage systems of 
Holland also belong here and are to be counted among 
the notable achievements in applied mechanics. 

Even the most casual review of the technological situa¬ 
tion in Europe, say in the seventeenth century, will 
bring out characteristic features that cannot be denied 
honourable mention as applications of mechanical science, 
although the reserve caution is immediately to be entered 
that these early mechanical expedients and their em¬ 
ployment stand out as sporadic facts of mechanical 
contrivance in an age of manual work, rather than as 
characteristic traits of the industrial system in which 
they are found. The beginnings of the machine industry 
are of this sporadic character. They come up as an out¬ 
growth of the handicraft technology, particularly at 
conjunctures where that technology is called on to deal 


The Machine Industry 


3 01 


with such large mechanical problems as exceed the force 
of manual labour or that elude the reach of the crafts¬ 
man’s tools. 

So, e . g., in England, say from the sixteenth century 
onward, there are improvements in highways and water¬ 
ways and in the drainage of agricultural lands; and, as 
an instance more obviously related to the machine in¬ 
dustry as commonly apprehended, there comes early 
in the eighteenth century the “horse-hoing cultivation” 
on which Jethro Tull spent his enthusiasm. Along with 
this obviously mechanical line of endeavour and innova¬ 
tion is also to be noted the deliberate efforts to improve 
the races of sheep and cattle that were in progress about 
the same time. These are perhaps not to be rated as 
mechanical inventions in the simple and obvious sense 
of the phrase, but they have this trait in common with 
the inventions of the machine era that they turn ascer¬ 
tained facts of brute nature to account for human use 
by a logic that has much of that character of impersonal 
incidence that marks the machine technology. The 
machine industry comes on gradually; its initial stages 
are visible in the early eighteenth century, but it is only 
toward the close of that century that its effects on the 
industrial system become so pronounced that the era 
of the machine technology may fairly be said to have 
set in; and it is only in Great Britain that it can be said 
to prevail at that period. 

Of the other features above alluded to as characteristic 
of this period of history none are of so substantial a 
character or so distinctive of this particular period as its 
technological peculiarities. Free competition, e. g., be¬ 
longs as much to the era of handicraft as to that of the 


302 The Instinct of Workmanship 

» 

machine, having prevailed—more extensively in theory 
than in practice—under the former regime as under 
the latter; and in point of fact it gradually falls under 
increasing restrictions as the machine age advances, until 
in the more highly developed phases of the current situa¬ 
tion it has largely ceased to be a practicable line of policy 
in industrial business. So, also, Capitalism did not take 
its rise coincident with the industrial revolution, al¬ 
though its best development and largest expansion may 
lie within the machine age. It had its beginnings in the 
prosperous days of handicraft, and one capitalistic era 
had already run its course, on the Continent, before the 
machine industry came in. The “ credit economy,” 
associated with the capitalistic management of industry, 
is also of older growth, so far as regards the days of its 
early vigour, although the larger and more far-reaching 
developments of credit come effectually into play only 
in the later decades of the machine age. Much the same 
is true of the so-called large-scale organisation of indus¬ 
try and the factory system. Its highest development 
comes with the advanced stages of the machine tech¬ 
nology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter, but 
it was already a force to be counted with at the time of 
the industrial revolution. The large-scale industry con¬ 
templated, with a degree of apprehension, by Adam 
Smith, e. g ., was not based on the machine technology 
but on handicraft with an extensive division of labour, 
and on the “ household industry ” as that was gaining 
ground in his time. The latter was, in form, what has 
since come to be known as the “sweatshop” industry. 

In this new era technology comes into close touch with 


The Machine Industry 


303 


science; both the science and the technology of the new 
age being of a matter-of-fact character, beyond all pre¬ 
cedent. So much so that by contrast, the technology 
of handicraft would appear to have stood in no close or 
consistent relation with the avowed science of its time. 
Not that anthropomorphic imputation is altogether 
wanting or inoperative in this latter-day scientific in¬ 
quiry, or in the technological utilisation of the facts in 
hand; but in the later conceptions anthropomorphism 
has at the best been repressed and sterilised in an un¬ 
precedented degree. And it holds true for the machine 
technology beyond any other state of the industrial arts 
that the facts of observation can effectually be turned 
to account only in so far as they are apprehended in a 
matter-of-fact way. The logic of this technology, by 
which its problems are to be worked out, is the logic of 
a mechanical process in which no personal or teleological 
factors enter. The engineer or inventor who designs 
processes, appliances and expedients within these prem¬ 
ises is required to apprehend and appreciate the working 
facts after that dispassionate, opaque, unteleological 
fashion in which the phenomena of brute matter occur; 
and he must learn to work out their uses by the logic of 
brute matter instead of construing them by imputation 
and by analogy with the manifestations of human work¬ 
manship. Less imperatively, but still in a marked degree, 
the same spirit must be found in the workmen under 
whose tendance these processes and appliances are to 
work out the designed results. 

Under the simpler technology of more primitive in¬ 
dustrial systems recourse to anthropomorphic imputa¬ 
tion has also always been a hindrance to workmanlike 


304 The Instinct of Workmanship 

mastery, more particularly in the mechanic arts proper, 
and only less pronounced in those industrial arts, like 
husbandry, that have to do immediately with plants and 
animals. Knowledge of brute facts as interpreted in 
terms of human nature appears never to have been ser¬ 
viceable in full proportion to their content. But in these 
more primitive industrial systems—as also in the better 
days of handicraft—the workman is forever in instant 
control of his tools and materials; the movements made 
use of in the work are essentially of the nature of manipu¬ 
lation, in which the workman adroitly coerces the ma¬ 
terials into shapes and relations that will answer his 
purpose, and in which also nothing (typically) takes 
place beyond the manual reach of the workman as ex¬ 
tended by the tools which his hands make use of. 

Under these conditions it is a matter of relatively slight 
effect whether the workman does or does not rate the ob¬ 
jects which he uses as tools andmaterials in quasi-personal 
terms or imputes to them a degree of self-direction; since 
they are at no point allowed to escape his manual reach 
and are by direct communication of his force, dexterity 
and judgment coerced into the forms, motions and 
spatial dispositions aimed at by him. His imputing 
some bias, bent, initiative or spiritual force or infirmity 
to brute matter will doubtless incapacitate him by so 
much for efficiently designing processes and uses for the 
available material facts; his creative imagination pro¬ 
ceeds on mistaken premises and goes wrong in so far; 
and so this anthropomorphic interpretation must always 
count as a material drawback to technological mastery 
of the available resources and in some degree retard the 
possible advance in the industrial arts. But within the 


The Machine Industry 


305 


premises given by the industrial arts as they stand, he 
may still do effective work as a mechanic skilled in the 
manual operations prescribed by the given state of the 
arts. For in the mechanic industries of all these other 
and more archaic industrial systems the workman does 
the work; it may be by use of tools, and even by help of 
more or less extended processes in which natural forces 
of growth, fermentation, decay, and the like, play a ma¬ 
terial part; but the decisive fact remains that the motions 
and operations of such manual industry take effect at 
his hands and by way of his muscular force and manual 
reach. Where natural processes, as those of growth, 
fermentation or combustion, are drawn into the routine 
of industry, they lie, as natural processes, beyond his 
discretionary control; at the most he puts them in train 
and lets them run, with some hedging and shifting as 
they go on, to bring them to bear in such a way as shall 
suit his ends; he takes his precautions with them and 
then he takes the chance of their coming to the desired 
issue. They are not, and as he sees the work and its 
conditions they need not be, within his control in any¬ 
thing like the fashion in which he controls his tools and 
the materials employed in his manual operations; they 
work well or ill, and what comes of it is in some degree 
a matter of his fortune of success or failure, such as comes 
to the man who has done his best under Providence. 
In case of a striking outcome for good or ill from the 
operation of such natural processes the devout craftsman 
is inclined to rate it as the act of God; very much as does 
the devout husbandman who depends on rain rather 
than on irrigation. It is the part of the wise workman in 
such a case to take what comes, without elation or re- 


3 °6 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


pining, in so far as these factors of success and failure are 
not comprised in his presumed workmanlike proficiency. 

The matter lies differently in the machine industry. 
The mechanical processes here engaged are calculable, 
measurable, and contain no mysterious element of provi¬ 
dential ambiguity. In proportion as they work to the 
best effect, they are capable of theoretical statement, 
not merely approachable by rule of thumb. The design¬ 
ing engineer takes his measures on the basis of ascer¬ 
tained quantitative fact. He knows the forces employed, 
and, indeed, he can employ only such as he knows and 
only so far as he knows them; and he arranges for the 
processes that are to do the work, with only such cal¬ 
culable margin of error as is due to the ascertained aver¬ 
age infirmity of the available materials. Pie deals with 
forces and effects standardised in the same opaque terms. 
He will be proficient in his craft in much the same degree 
in which he is master of the matter-of-fact logic involved 
in mechanical processes of pressure, velocity, displace¬ 
ment and the like; not in proportion as he can adroitly 
impart to the available materials the workmanlike turn 
of his own manual force and dexterity, nor in the degree 
in which he may be able shrewdly to guess the run of 
the season or the variations of temperature and moisture 
that condition the effectual serviceability of natural 
processes in handicraft. 

The share of the operative workman in the machine 
industry is (typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, 
whose duty it is to keep pace with the machine process 
and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at 
points where the machine process engaged is incomplete. 1 

1 Jii a general way, the relation in which the skilled workman in the 


The Machine Industry 307 

A. 

His work supplements the machine process, rather than 
makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process 
makes use of the workman. The ideal mechanical con¬ 
trivance in this technological system is the automatic 
machine. Perfection in the machine technology is at¬ 
tained in the degree in which the given process can dis¬ 
pense with manual labour; whereas perfection in the 
handicraft system means perfection of manual work¬ 
manship. It is the part of the workman to know the 
working of the mechanism with which he is associated 
and to adapt his movements with mechanical accuracy 
to its requirement. This demands a degree of intelli¬ 
gence, and much of this work calls for a good deal of 
special training besides; so that it is still true that the 
workman is useful somewhat in proportion as he is skilled 
in the occupation to which the machine industry calls 
him. In the new era the stress falls rather more decidedly 
on general intelligence and information, as contrasted 
with detail mastery of the minutiae of a trade; so that 
familiarity with the commonplace technological knowl¬ 
edge of the time is rather more imperative a requirement 
under the machine technology than under that of handi¬ 
craft. At the same time this common stock of techno¬ 
logical information is greatly larger in the current state 
of the industrial arts; so much larger in volume, and at 
the same time so much more exacting in point of ac¬ 
curacy and detail, that this commonplace information 
that is requisite to any of the skilled occupations can no 

large industries stands to the machine process is analogous to that in 
which the primitive herdsman, shepherd or dairymaid stand to the 
domestic animals under their care, rather than to the relation of the 
craftsman to his tools. It is a work of attendance, furtherance and skilled 
interference rather than a forceful and dexterous use of an implement. j 


3°8 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


longer be acquired in the mere workday routine of in¬ 
dustry, but is to be had only at the cost of deliberate 
application and with the help of schools. 

On this head, as regards the requirements of industry 
in the way of general information on the part of the 
skilled workmen, the contrast is sufficiently marked, 
e. g., between Elizabethan times and the Victorian age. 
At the earlier period illiteracy was no obstacle to ade¬ 
quate training in the skilled trades. In the seventeenth 
century Thomas Mun includes among the peculiar and 
extraordinary acquirements necessary to eminent suc¬ 
cess in commerce, matters that are now easily comprised 
in the ordinary common-school instruction; and in so 
doing he plainly shows that these acquirements were 
over and above what was usual or would be thought 
useful for the common man. Even Adam Smith, in the 
latter half of the eighteenth century, shrewd observer 
as he was, does not include any degree of schooling or any 
similar pursuit of general information among the requi¬ 
sites essential to the efficiency of skilled labour. Even 
at that date it appears still to have been true that the 
commonplace information and the general training neces¬ 
sary to a mastery of any one of the crafts lay within so 
narrow a range that what was needful could all be ac¬ 
quired by hearsay and as an incident to the discipline of 
apprenticeship. Within a century after the first incep¬ 
tion of the machine industry illiteracy had come to be a 
serious handicap to any skilled mechanic; the range of 
commonplace information that must habitually be drawn 
on in the skilled trades had widened to such an extent, 
and comprised so large a volume of recondite facts, that 
the ability to read came to have an industrial value; the 


The Machine Industry 


3°9 


higher proficiency in any branch of the mechanic arts 
presumed such an acquaintance with fact and theory 
as could neither be gained nor maintained without habi¬ 
tual recourse to printed matter. And this line of re¬ 
quirements has been constantly increasing in volume 
and urgency, as well as in the range of employments to 
which the demand applies, until it has become a com¬ 
monplace that no one can now hope to compete for pro¬ 
ficiency in the skilled occupations without such schooling 
as will carry him very appreciably beyond the three R’s 
that made up the complement of necessary learning for 
the common man half a century ago. 

It follows as a consequence of these large and increasing 
requirements enforced by the machine technology that 
the period of preliminary training is necessarily longer, 
and the schooling demanded for general preparation 
grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart 
from all question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular 
fitness for democratic citizenship, it has become a matter 
of economic expediency, simply as a proposition in tech¬ 
nological efficiency at large, to enforce the exemption 
of children from industrial employment until a later 
date and to extend their effective school age appreciably 
beyond what would once have been sufficient to meet all 
the commonplace requirements of skilled workmanship. 1 

1 It follows also, among other secondary consequences, that the effective 
industrial life of the skilled workman will, in order to the best average 
effect, begin at an appreciably more advanced age, and will therefore be 
shortened by that much. The period of preparation becomes more pro¬ 
tracted, more exacting and more costly, and the effective life cycle of the 
workman grows shorter. Although it does not, perhaps, belong in pre¬ 
cisely this connection, it may not be out of place to recall that the in¬ 
creasingly exacting requirements of the machine industry, particularly 


3 10 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


The knowledge so required as a general and common¬ 
place equipment requisite for the pursuit of these modern 
skilled occupations is of the general nature of applied 
mechanics, in which the essence of the undertaking is a 
ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact 
quantitative terms. This class of knowledge presumes 
a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of 
the workman, such an attitude and animus as will readily 
apprehend and appreciate matter of fact and will guard 
against the suffusion of this knowledge with putative 
animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-personal 
interpretations of the observed phenomena and of their 
relations to one another. The norm of systematisation 
is that given by the logic of the machine process, and the 


in the way of accurate, alert and facile conformity to the requirements of 
the machine process, interrupt the industrial life of the skilled workman 
at an earlier point in the course of senile decay. So that the industrial 
life-cycle of the workman is shortened both at its beginning and at its 
close, at the same time that the commonplace preparation for work grows 
more costly and exacting. 

Child labour, which once may, industrially speaking, have been an 
economical method of consuming the available human material, is no 
longer compatible with the highest industrial efficiency, even apart from 
any question of hardship or deterioration incident to an excessive or 
abusive recourse to child labour; it is incompatible with the community’s 
material interests. Therefore the business community—the body of 
businessmen at large—for whose behoof the industries of the country are 
carried on, have a direct interest not only in extending the age of exemp¬ 
tion from industrial employment but also in procuring an adequate 
schooling of the incoming generation of workmen. The business com¬ 
munity is evidently coming to appreciate this state of the case, at least 
in some degree, as is evidenced by their inclination to favour instruction 
in the “practical” branches in the public schools, at the public expense, 
as well as by the wide-reaching movement that aims to equip private and 
state schools that shall prepare the youth for work in the various lines of 
industrial employment. 


The Machine Industry 


3 « 


scope of it is that inculcated by statistical computation 
and the principle of material cause and effect. 

In some degree the routine of the machine industry 
necessarily induces such an animus in its employees, 
since such is the scope and method of its own working; 
and the closer and more exacting the application to 
work of this kind, the more thorough-going should be the 
effects of its discipline. But this routine and its disci¬ 
pline extend beyond the mechanical occupations as such, 
so as in great part to determine the habits of all members 
of the modern community. This proposition holds true 
more broadly for the current state of the industrial arts 
than any similar statement would hold, e. g., for the 
handicraft system. The ordinary routine of life is more 
widely and pervasively determined by the machine in¬ 
dustry and by machine-like industrial processes today, 
and this determination is at the same time more rigorous, 
than any analogous effect that was had under the handi¬ 
craft system. Within the effective bounds of modern 
Christendom no one can wholly escape or in any sensible 
degree deflect the sweep of the machine’s routine. 

Modern life goes by clockwork. So much so that no 
modern household can dispense with a mechanical time¬ 
piece; which may be more or less accurate, it is true, but 
which commonly marks the passage of time with a degree 
of exactness that would have seemed divertingly super¬ 
erogatory to the common man of the high tide of handi¬ 
craft. 1 Latterly the time so indicated, it should be called 
to mind, is “ standard time,” standardised to coincide 
over wide areas and to vary only by large and standard 

1 Cf., e. g., Adam Smith’s reflections on the uses of an accurate watch. 
Theory of the Moral Sentiments , part iv, ch. 2. 


312 The Instinct of Workmanship 

units. It brings the routine of life to a nicely uniform 
schedule of hours throughout a population which exceeds 
by many fold the size of those communities that once 
got along contentedly enough without such an expedient 
under the regime of handicraft. In this matter the de¬ 
mands of the machine have even brought on a revision 
of the time schedule imposed by the mechanism of the 
heavenly bodies, so that not only “solar time/’ but even 
the “mean solar time” that once was considered to be a 
sufficient improvement on the ways of Nature, has been 
superseded by the schedule imposed by the railway 
system. 

The discipline of the timepiece is sufficiently charac¬ 
teristic of the discipline exercised by the machine process 
at large in modern life, and as a cultural factor, as a 
factor in shaping the habits of thought of the modern 
peoples, it is itself moreover a fact of the first importance. 
Of the standardisation of the time schedule just spoken 
of, the earlier, the adoption of “mean solar time,” was 
due immediately to the exigencies of the machine process 
as such, which would not tolerate the seasonal fluctua¬ 
tions of “apparent ” solar time. This epithet “apparent,” 
by the way, carries a suggestion that the time schedule 
so designated is less true to the actualities of the case 
than the one which superseded it. And so it is if the 
actualities to which regard is had are those of the ma¬ 
chine process; whereas the contrary is true if the ac¬ 
tualities that are to decide are those of the seasons, as 
they were under the earlier dispensation. “Standard 
time” has gone into effect primarily through the neces¬ 
sities of railway communication,—itself a dominant 
item in the mechanical routine of life; but it is only in a 


The Machine Industry 


313 


less degree a requirement of the other activities that go 
to make up the traffic of modern life. The railway is 
one of the larger mechanical contrivances of the machine 
age, and its exigencies in this respect are typical of what 
holds true at large. Communication of whatever kind, as 
well as the supply of other necessaries, is standardised 
in terms of time, space, quantity, frequency, and indeed 
in all measurable dimensions; and the “consumer,” as 
the denizens of these machine-made communities are 
called, is required to conform to this network of stand¬ 
ardisations in his demand and uses of them, on pain of 
“getting left.” To “get left” is a colloquialism of the 
machine era and describes the commonest form of priva¬ 
tion under the regime of the machine process. It is 
already a timeworn colloquialism, inasmuch as it is 
now already some time since the ubiquitous routine of 
the machine process first impressed on the common man 
the sinister eventuality covered by the phrase. 

The relation in which the consumer, the common man, 
stands to the mechanical routine of life at large is of 
much the same nature as that in which the modern 
skilled workman stands to that detail machine process 
into which he is dovetailed in the industrial system. To 
take effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels 
of routine go round, in the way of work and play, liveli¬ 
hood and recreation, he must know by facile habitua¬ 
tion what is going on and how and in what quantities 
and at what price and where and when, and for the best 
effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exacti¬ 
tude and a cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced 
moving equilibrium of the mechanical processes engaged. 
To live—not to say at ease—under the exigencies of 


314 The Instinct of Workmanship 

\ A, -V . 1 

this machine-made routine requires a measure of con¬ 
sistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. 
The mere mechanics of conformity to the schedule of 
living implies a degree of trained insight and a facile 
strategy in all manner of quantitive adjustments and 
adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of popula¬ 
tion, where the routine is more comprehensive and 
elaborate. 

And here and now, as always and everywhere, inven¬ 
tion is the mother of necessity. The complex of techno¬ 
logical ways and means grows by increments that come 
into the scheme by way of improvements, innovations, 
expedients designed to facilitate, abridge or enhance the 
work to be done. Any such innovation that fits workably 
into the technological scheme, and that in any appreciable 
degree accelerates the pace of that scheme at any point, 
will presently make its way into general and imperative 
use, regardless of whether its net ulterior effect is an 
increase or a diminution of material comfort or industrial 
efficiency. Such is particularly the case under the cur¬ 
rent pecuniary scheme of life if the new expedient lends 
itself to the service of competitive gain or competitive 
spending; its general adoption then peremptorily takes 
effect on pain of damage and discomfort to all those 
who fail to strike the new pace. Each new expedient 
added to and incorporated in the system offers not only 
a new means of keeping up with the run of things at an 
accelerated pace, but also a new chance of getting left 
out of the running. The point is well seen, e. g., in the 
current competitive armaments, where equipment is 
subject to constant depreciation and obsolescence, not 
through decline or decay, but by virtue of new improve- 



The Machine Industry 


3*5 


ments. So also in the increase and acceleration of ad¬ 
vertising that has been going on during the past quarter 
of a century, due to increased facilities and improved 
methods in printing, paper-making, and the other in¬ 
dustrial arts that contribute to the appliances of pub¬ 
licity. 

It is of course not hereby intended to imply that these 
modern inventions meet no wants but such as they 
themselves create. It is beyond dispute that such me¬ 
chanical contrivances, for instance, as the telephone, the 
typewriter, and the automobile are not only great and 
creditable technological achievements, but they are also 
of substantial service. At the same time it is at least 
doubtful if these inventions have not wasted more effort 
and substance than they have saved,—that they are to 
be credited with an appreciable net loss. They are de¬ 
signed to facilitate travel and communication, and such 
is doubtless their first and obvious effect. But the net 
result of their introduction need by no means be the 
same. Their chief use is in the service of business, not 
of industry, and their great further use is in the further¬ 
ance, or rather the acceleration, of obligatory social 
amenities. As contrivances for the expedition of traffic 
both in business and in social intercourse their use is 
chiefly, almost wholly, of a competitive nature; and in 
the competitive equipment and manoeuvres of business 
and of gentility the same broad principle will be found 
to apply as applies to competitive armaments and im¬ 
provements in the technology of warfare. Any techno¬ 
logical advantage gained by one competitor forthwith 
becomes a necessity to all the rest, on pain of defeat. 
The typewriter is, no doubt, a good and serviceable con- 


316 The Instinct of Workma nship 

trivance for the expedition of a voluminous correspond¬ 
ence, but there is also no reasonable doubt but its intro¬ 
duction has appreciably more than doubled the volume 
of correspondence necessary to carry on a given volume 
of business, or that it has quadrupled the necessary cost 
of such correspondence. And the expedition of corre¬ 
spondence by stenographer and typewriter has at the 
same time become obligatory on all business firms, on 
pain of losing caste and so of losing the confidence of 
their correspondents. Of the telephone much the same 
is to be said, with the addition that its use involves a very 
appreciable nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence 
conduces to an unremitting nervous tension and unrest 
wherever it goes. The largest secure result of these 
various modern contrivances designed to facilitate and 
abridge travel and communication appears to be an 
increase of the volume of traffic per unit of outcome, 
acceleration of the pace and heightening of the tension 
at which the traffic is carried on, and a consequent in¬ 
crease of nervous disorders and shortening of the effec¬ 
tive working life of those engaged in this traffic. But 
in these matters invention is the mother of necessity, 
and within the scope of these contrivances for facili¬ 
tating and abridging labour there is no alternative, and 
life is not offered on any other terms. 1 


1 On the other hand the aphorism often cited, that “Necessity is the 
Mother of Invention, ” appears to be nothing better than a fragment of 
uncritical rationalism. It offers a rationalised, ex post facto account of 
changes that take place, and reflects that ancient preconception by help 
of which the spokesmen of edification were enabled to interpret all 
change as an improvement due to the achievement of some definitely 
foreknown end. It appears also to be consistently untrue, except so far 
as “invention” is to be taken as a euphemistic synonym for “prevarica- 


The Machine Industry 


3*7 


Other kinds of routine, standardised and elaborate, 
have been or still are in force, besides this machine-like 
process of living as carried on under modern technological 
conditions; and one and another of these will at times 
rise to a degree of exigence quite comparable with that 
of the machine process. But these others are of a dif¬ 
ferent character in that their demands are not enforced 
by sanctions of an unmediated mechanical kind; they 
do not fall on the delinquent with a direct mechanical 
impact, and the penalties of non-conformity are of a con¬ 
ventional nature. So, e. g., the punctilios of religious 
observance may come to a very rigid routine, to be 
observed on pain of sufficiently grave consequences; but 
in so far as these eventual (eschatological) consequences 
are statable in terms of material incidence (of fire, sul¬ 
phur, or the like) the mechanically trained modern 
consumer will incline to hold that they are of a putative 
character only. So, again, in the matter of fashion and de¬ 
corum the schedule of observances may be sufficiently rig¬ 
orous, but here too failure to articulate with the sweep 
of a punctilious routine with all the sure and firm touch 
of the expert is not checked with an immediate disas¬ 
trous impact of mechanical shock. Conformity in the 
technological respect with the routine of living under 
other technological systems than that of the machine 
process had also something of this character of conven¬ 
tional prescription; and the discipline exercised by the 

tion.” Doubtless, the felt need of ways and means has brought on many 
changes in technology, but doubtless also the ulterior consequences of 
any one of the greater mechanical inventions have in the main been 
neither foreseen nor intended in the designing of them. The more serious 
consequences, especially such as have an institutional bearing, have been 
enforced by the inventions rather than designed by the inventors. 


318 The Instinct of Workmanship 

routine of living in these more archaic technological 
eras was also something more in the nature of a training 
in conventional expedients. The resulting growth of 
habits of thought in such a community should then 
also differ in a similar way from what comes in sight in 
the present. 

Both in its incidence on the workman and on the 
members of the community at large, therefore, the train¬ 
ing given by this current state of the industrial arts is a 
training in the impersonal, quantitative apprehension 
and appreciation of things, and it tends strongly to 
inhibit and discredit all imputation of spiritual traits 
to the facts of observation. It is a training in matter-of- 
fact; more specifically it is a training in the logic of the 
machine process. Its outcome should obviously be an 
unqualified materialistic and mechanical animus in all 
orders of society, most pronounced in the working classes, 
since they are most immediately and consistently ex¬ 
posed to the discipline of the machine process. But 
such an animus as best comports with the logic of the 
machine process does not, it appears, for good or ill, 
best comport with the native strain of human nature in 
those peoples that are subject to its discipline. In all 
the various peoples of Christendom there is a visible 
straining against the drift of the machine’s teaching, 
rising at time and in given classes of the population to 
the pitch of revulsion. 

It is apparently among the moderately well-to-do, the 
half-idle classes, that such a revulsion chiefly has its 
way; leading now and again to fantastic, archaising 
cults and beliefs and to make-believe credence in occult 


The Machine Industry 


3i9 


insights and powers. At the same time, and with the 
like tincture of affectation and make-believe, there runs 
through much of the community a feeling of maladjust¬ 
ment and discomfort, that seeks a remedy in a “return 
to Nature” in one way or another; some sort of a return 
to “the simple life,” which shall in some fashion afford 
an escape from the unending “grind” of living from day 
to day by the machine method and shall so put behind 
us for a season the burdensome futilities by help of which 
alone life can be carried on under the routine of the 
machine process. 

All this uneasy revulsion may not be taken at its face 
value; there is doubtless a variable but fairly large ele¬ 
ment of affectation that comes to expression in all this 
talk about the simple life; but when all due abatement 
has been allowed there remains a substantial residue of 
unaffected protest. The pitch and volume of this pro¬ 
test against “artificial” and “futile” ways of life is 
greatest in the advanced industrial countries, and it 
has been growing greater concomitantly with the ad¬ 
vance of the machine era. What is perhaps more signif¬ 
icant of actualities than these well-bred professions of 
discomfort and discontent is the “vacation,” being a 
more tangible phenomenon and statable in quantitative 
terms. The custom of “taking a vacation” has been on 
the increase for some time, and the avowed need of a 
yearly or seasonal holiday greatly exceeds the practice 
of it in nearly all callings. This growing recourse to 
vacations should be passably conclusive evidence to the 
effect that neither the manner of life enforced by the 
machine system, nor the occupations of those who are 
in close contact with this technology and its due habits 


320 The Instinct of Workmanship 

\ 

of thought, can be “natural” to the common run of civil¬ 
ised mankind. 

According to accepted theories of heredity, 1 civilised 
mankind should by native endowment be best fit to 
live under conditions of a moderately advanced savagery, 
such as the machine technology will not permit. 2 Neither 
in the physical conditions which it imposes, therefore, 
nor in the habitual ways of observation and reasoning 
which it requires in the work to be done, is the machine 
age adapted to the current native endowment of the 
race. And these various movements of unrest and revul¬ 
sion are evidence, for as much as they are worth, that 
such is the case. 

Not least convincing is the fact that a considerable 
proportion of those who are held unremittingly to the 
service of the machine process “break down,” fall into 
premature decay. Physically and spiritually these mod¬ 
ern peoples are better adapted to life under conditions 
radically different from those imposed by this modern 
technology. 3 All of which goes to show, what is the 

1 See pp. 18-21, above. 

2 Cf., however, what has been said above (pp. 21-23) °f the varia¬ 
bility and adaptability of a hybrid population and the possible selective 
establishment of a hybrid type more suitable to current conditions of life 
than any one of the racial stocks out of which the hybrid population is 
made up. 

3 So, e. g., the modern technology has, directly and indirectly, brought 
on the growth of large cities and industrial towns, as well as an increas¬ 
ing density of population at large. This modern state of the industrial 
arts is a creation of the European community of nations, with the blond- 
hybrid populations leading. The population of these countries is drifting 
into these machine-made cities and towns, and this drift affects the blond- 
hybrids in a more pronounced degree than any other similarly distin¬ 
guishable element in the population. At the same time the birth-rate is 
lower and the death-rate higher in these modern urban communities than 


3^1 


The Machine Industry 

point here in question, that however exacting and how¬ 
ever pervasive the discipline of the machine process may 
be, it can not, after all, achieve its perfect work in the 
way of habituation in the population of Christendom 
as it stands. The limit of tolerance native to the race, 
physically and spiritually, is short of that unmitigated 
materialism and unremitting mechanical routine to which 
the machine technology incontinently drives. 

For anything like a comprehensive view of the effects 
which the machine technology has had on the scope and 
method of knowledge in modern times it is necessary 
to turn back to its beginnings. Historically the machine 
age succeeds the era of handicraft, but the two overlap 
very extensively. So much so that while the era of the 
machine technology is commonly held to have set in 
something like a century and a half ago it is still too 
early to assert that the industrial system has cleared 

in the open country, in spite of the fact that more attention is given to 
preventive sanitation in the urban than in the rural communities, and 
it is in the urban communities that medical attendance is most available, 
at the same time that its most efficient practitioners congregate there. 
This accelerated death-rate strikes the blond-hybrids of the towns in ah 
eminent degree; and infant mortality in the towns, particularly, runs at 
such a figure as to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. In its 
summary effects on the viability of the modern peoples this modern 
technology appears to be as untoward as would their removal to an un¬ 
suitable climate. Indeed the hygienic measures that are taken or ad¬ 
vocated as a remedy for these machine-made conditions of urban life 
are of much the same character and require much the same degree of 
meticulous attention to details that are required to preserve the life of 
Europeans under the precarious climatic conditions of the low latitudes. 
So that, for these Europeans at least, the hygienic situation created 
by their own technology has much of that character of a comprehensive 
clinic that attaches to the British occupation of India or the later Euro¬ 
pean occupation of West Africa or the Philippines. 

f 


322 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


itself of the remnants of handicraft or that the habits 
of thought suitable to the days of handicraft are no 
longer decisive in the current legal and popular appre¬ 
hension of industrial relations. The discipline of the 
machine process has not yet had time, nor has it had a 
clear field. The best that can be looked for, therefore, 
in the way of habits of thought conforming to the ways 
and means of the machine process should be something 
of a progressive approximation; and the considerations 
recited in the last few paragraphs should leave it doubt¬ 
ful whether anything more than an imperfect approxima¬ 
tion to the logic of the machine process can be achieved, 
through any length of training, by the peoples among 
whom the greatest advance in that direction has already 
been made. 

The material sciences early show the bias of the ma¬ 
chine technology, as is fairly to be expected, since these 
sciences stand in a peculiarly close relation to the tech¬ 
nological side of industry,—almost a relation of affilia¬ 
tion. At no earlier period has the correlation between 
science and technology been so close. And the response 
in respect of the scope and method of these sciences to 
any notable advance in technology has been sufficiently 
striking. As has already been indicated above, modern 
science at large takes to the use of statistical methods 
and precise mechanical measurements, and in this matter 
scientific inquiry has grown continually more confident 
and more meticulous at the same time that this me¬ 
chanistic procedure is continually being applied more 
extensively as the technological advance goes forward. 
How far this statistical-mechanistic bias of modem in¬ 
quiry is to be set down to the account of the drift of 


The Machine Industry 


323 


technology toward mechanical engineering, and how far 
it may be due to an ever increasing familiarity with 
conceptions of accountancy enforced by the price system 
and the time schedule in daily life, may be left an open 
question. The main fact remains, that in much the same 
degree as niceties of calculation have come to dominate 
current technological methods and devices the like in¬ 
sistence on extreme niceties of mechanical measurement 
and statistical accuracy has also become imperative 
in scientific inquiry; until it may fairly be said that such 
meticulous scrutiny of quantitative relations as would 
have seemed foolish in the early days of the machine 
era has become the chief characteristic of scientific in¬ 
quiry today. 1 It is of course not overlooked that in this 
matter of quantitative scruple the relation between cur¬ 
rent technology and the sciences is a relation of mutual 
give and take; but this fact can scarcely be urged as an 
objection to the view that these two lines of expression 
of the modern habit of mind are closely bound together, 
since it is precisely such a bond of continuity between 
the two that is here spoken for. 

As shown in the foregoing chapter, in the course of 
the transition to modern times and modern ways of 
thinking the principle of efficient cause gradually re¬ 
placed that of sufficient reason as the final ground of 
certitude in conclusions of a theoretical nature. This 
shifting of the metaphysical footing of knowledge from 
a subjective ground to an objective one first and most 
unreservedly affects the material sciences, as it should 

1 The statisticians of a hundred years ago, e. g., were content to work 
in round percentages where their latterday successors are doubtfully 
content with three-place decimals. 


324 The Instinct of Workmanship 

if it is at all to be construed as an outcome of the dis¬ 
cipline exercised by the then current technology of 
handicraft. But the like effect is presently, though 
tardily, had in other lines of systematic knowledge that 
lie farther from the immediate incidence of technology 
and secular traffic. So that by the time of the industrial 
revolution the like mechanistic animus had come to 
pervade even the philosophical and theological specula¬ 
tions current in those communities that were most inti¬ 
mately and unreservedly touched by the discipline of 
craftsmanship and the petty trade. 1 

By this time,—the latter part of the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury,—the material sciences (overtly) admit no principle 
of systematisation within their own jurisdiction other 
than that of efficient cause. But at that date the concept 
of causation still has much of the content given it by 
the technology of handicraft. The efficient cause is still 
conceived after an individualistic fashion; without grave 
exaggeration it might even be said that the concept of 
cause as currently employed in the scientific speculations 
of that time had something of a quasi-personal com¬ 
plexion. The inquiry habitually looked to some one 
efficient cause, engaged as creatively dominant in the 
case and working to its end under conditioning circum- 

1 An eminently illustrative instance of the mechanistic bias in the moral 
sciences is afforded by the hedonistic conceptions of the early nineteenth 
century; and the deistic theology of that period and earlier is no less 
characteristic a symptom of the same animus. 

Cf. also, for a view running to a conclusion opposed to that spoken 
for above, H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (translation by Arthur Mitchell, 
New York, 1911), ch. i, especially pp. 16-23; where the mechanistic con¬ 
ception is construed as an instinctive metaphysical norm and contrasted 
with the deliverances of reason and experience, which are then held to 
inculcate an anthropomorphic interpretation of the same facts. 





The Machine Industry 


325 


stances that might greatly affect the outcome but that 
were not felt (or avowed) to enter into the case with the 
same aggressive thrust of causality that belonged to the 
efficient cause proper. The “contributory circum¬ 
stances’ 7 were conceived rather extrinsically as accessory 
to the event; “accessory before the fact,” perhaps, but 
none the less accessory. And scientific research took the 
form of an inquiry into the causal nexus between an ante¬ 
cedent (a cause or complex of causes) and its outcome in 
an event. The inquiry looked to the beginning and end 
of an episode of activity, the outcome of which would 
be a finished product, somewhat after the fashion in 
which a finished piece of work leaves the craftsman’s 
hands. The craftsman is the agency productively en¬ 
gaged in the case, while his tools and materials are acces¬ 
sories to his force and skill, and the finished goods leave 
his hands as an end achieved; and so an episode of crea¬ 
tive efficiency is rounded off. 

From an early period in the machine era a new attitude 
toward questions of causation comes in evidence in scien¬ 
tific inquiry. The obvious change is perhaps the larger 
scale on which the sequence of cause and effect is con¬ 
ceived. It is no longer predominantly a question of 
episodes of causal efficiency, detached and rounded off. 
Such detail episodes still continue to occupy the routine 
of investigation; necessarily so, since these empirical 
sciences proceed step by step in the determination of 
the phenomena with which they are occupied. But in 
an increasing degree these detached phenomena are 
sought to be worked into a theoretical structure of larger 
scope, and this larger structure of theory falls into shape 
as a self-determining sequence of cumulative change. 


326 The Instinct of Workmanship 

The same concept of process that rules in the machine 
technology invades the speculations of the scientists and 
results in theories of cumulative sequence, in which the 
point of departure as well as the objective end of the 
sequence of causation gradually come to have less and 
less of a determinative significance for the course of 
the inquiry and for its results. In theoretical specula¬ 
tions based on the data of the empirical sciences, interest 
and attention come progressively to centre on this 
process of cumulative causation, so that the interest in 
the productive efficiency of consummation ceases gradu¬ 
ally to be of decisive moment in the formulations of 
theory; which comes in this way to be an account of an 
unfolding process rather than a checking up of individual 
effects against individual causes. What once were ulti¬ 
mate questions have in modern science become ulterior 
questions and have lost their preferential place in the 
inquiry. Neither the seat of efficient initiative, that 
would be presumed to give this unfolding process of 
cumulative change its content and direction, nor its 
eventual goal, wherein it would be presumed to come to 
rest when the initial impulse has spent itself and its end 
has been compassed,—neither of these ultimates holds 
the attention or guides the inquiry of modern science. 

It is only gradually, concomitant with the gradual 
maturing of the machine technology, that the systematis¬ 
ation of knowledge in scientific theory has come by com¬ 
mon consent to converge on formulations of a genetic 
process of cumulative change. This science of the ma¬ 
chine age is “evolutionary” in a peculiarly impersonal, 
indeed in a mechanistic sense of the term. In the con¬ 
summate form, as it stands at the transition to the twen- 


The Machine Industry 


3 2 7 


tieth century, this evolutionary conception of genetic 
process is, at least ideally, void of all teleological ele¬ 
ments and of all personality—except as personality may 
be concessively admitted as a by-product of the me¬ 
chanistic sweep of the blind motions of brute matter. 
Neither the name nor the notion of a genetic evolution 
is peculiar to the machine age; but this current, imper¬ 
sonal, unteleological, mechanistic conception of an evolu¬ 
tionary process is peculiar to the late modern fashion of 
apprehending things. 

It goes without saying that this mechanistic concep¬ 
tion of process has worked clear of personation and 
teleological bias only gradually, by insensible decay 
and progressive elimination of those preconceptions of 
personal force and teleological fitness that ruled all 
theoretical knowledge in the days when the principle of 
sufficient reason held over that of efficient cause; and 
it should likewise be a matter of course that this shift to 
the mechanistic footing is by no means yet complete, 
that scientific inquiry is not yet clear of all contamina¬ 
tion with animistic, anthropomorphic, or teleological 
elements; since the change is of the nature of habit, 
which takes time, and since the discipline of modern 
life to which the mechanistic habit of mind is traceable 
is by no means wholly consistent or unqualified in its 
mechanistic drift. Yet so far has the habituation to 
mechanistic ways of thinking taken effect, and so com¬ 
prehensive and thorough has the discipline of the ma¬ 
chine process been, that a mechanistic, unteleological no¬ 
tion of evolution is today a commonplace preconception 
both with scientists and laymen; whereas a hundred 
years ago such a conceit had intimately touched the 


328 The Instinct of Workmanship 

- jv / if 

imagination of but very few, if any, among the scientific 
adepts of the new era. 

To what effect Lucretius and his like in classical an¬ 
tiquity, e. g., may have speculated and tried to speak 
in these premises is by no means easy to make out; nor 
does it concern the present inquiry, since no vital con¬ 
nection or continuity of habit is traceable between their 
achievements in this respect and the theoretical precon¬ 
ceptions of modern science or of the machine technology. 
In the course of modern times conceptions of an evolu¬ 
tionary sequence of creation or of genesis come up with 
increasing frequency, and from an early period in the 
machine age these conceptions take on more and more 
of a mechanistic character, but it is not until Darwin 
that such a genetic process of evolution is conceived in 
terms of blind mechanical forces alone, without the help 
of imputed teleological bias or personalised initiative. 
It may perhaps be an open question whether the Dar¬ 
winian conception of evolution is in no degree contami¬ 
nated with teleological fancies, but however that may 
be it remains true that a purely mechanistic conception 
of a genetic process in nature had found no lodgment in 
scientific theory up to the middle of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury. With varying success this conception has since 
been assimilated by the adepts of all the material sciences, 
and it may even be said to stand as a tacitly postulated 
commonplace underlying all modern scientific theory, 
whether in the material or the social sciences. It is 
accepted by common consent as a matter of course, al¬ 
though doubtless much antique detail at variance with 
it stands over both in the theoretical formulations of 
the adepts and in popular thought, and must continue 


The Machine Industry 329 

} * . .* 1 i 

to stand over until the course of habituation may con¬ 
ceivably in time enforce the sole competency of this 
mechanistic conception as the definitive norm of sys¬ 
tematic knowledge. Whether such an eventuality is to 
overtake the scope and method of knowledge in Western 
civilisation should apparently be a question of how pro¬ 
tracted, consistent, unmitigated, and how far congruous 
with their native bent the discipline of the machine 
process may prove in the further history of these peoples. 

As has been shown above, in its beginnings the machine 
technology took over the working concepts of handicraft, 
and it has gradually shifted from the ground of manual 
operation so afforded to the ground of impersonal me¬ 
chanical process; but this shifting of base in respect of 
the elementary technological preconceptions has not 
hitherto been complete, much of the personal attitude 
of craftsmanship toward mechanical forces and struc¬ 
tures being still visible in the work of modern technolo¬ 
gists. In like manner, and concomitant with the transi¬ 
tion to the machine industry, there has gone forward a 
like shifting in respect of the point of view and the ele¬ 
mentary preconceptions of science. This has taken 
effect most largely and gone farthest in the material 
sciences, as should be expected from the close connection 
that subsists between these sciences and the technology 
of the machine industry; but here again the elimination 
of craftsmanlike conceptions has hitherto not been com¬ 
plete. And, what is more instructive as to the part 
played by technological discipline in the growth of science, 
the character of this change in scientific scope, method 
and preconceptions is somewhat obviously such as would 


330 The Instinct of Workmanship 

be given by habituation to the working of the machine 
process. Where later scientific inquiry has departed 
from or overpassed the limitations imposed by the habits 
of thought peculiar to craftsmanship the movement has 
faken the direction enforced by the machine technology. 

So, e. g. y while the elements made use of by the ma¬ 
chine technology, and characteristic of its work, are con¬ 
ceptions of mass, velocity, pressure, stress, vibration, 
displacement, and the like, these elements are made use 
of only under the rule that action in any of these bearings 
takes effect only by impact, by contact directly or 
through a continuum. The mathematical computations 
and elucidations that are one main instrumentality 
employed by the technologist do not and can not include 
this underlying postulate of contact, since it is an assump¬ 
tion extraneous to those magnitudes of quantity in terms 
of which this technology does its work. How far this 
preconception that action can take place only by con¬ 
tact is to be rated as an elementary concept carried over 
from handicraft, where it is obviously at home and funda¬ 
mental in all work of manipulation, may perhaps be an 
idle question. In any case the machine technology is 
at one with craftsmanship on this head, even though 
there are many features in modern industrial processes 
that do not involve action by contact in any such ob¬ 
vious fashion as to suggest its necessary assumption, as, 
e. g. f in processes involving the use of light, heat or elec¬ 
tricity. Yet it remains true that, by and large, the 
technology of the machine process is a technology of 
action by contact; and, apparently under stress of this 
wide though not necessarily universal application of 
the principle, the trained technologist does not rest con- 


The Machine Industry 


33i 


tent until he has in some tenable fashion construed any 
apparent exception as a special instance under the rule. 

So also in modern scientific inquiry. The conceptual 
elements with which the scientist is content to work are 
precisely those that have commended themselves as 
competent in their technological use. Since action by 
contact is, on the whole, the working principle in the ma¬ 
chine process, it is also accepted as the prime postulate 
in the formulation of all exact knowledge of impersonal 
facts. There is, cf course, no inclination here to criticise 
or take exception to this characteristic habit of thought 
that pervades modern scientific inquiry. It has done 
good service, and to this generation, trained in the in¬ 
exorably efficient ways of the machine process, the fact 
that it works is conclusive of its truth. 1 Yet the further 
fact is not to be overlooked that adherence to this prin¬ 
ciple is not due to unsophisticated observation simply. 
It is a principle, a habit of thought, not a fact of simple 
observation. Doubtless it is a fact of observation, direct 
and unambiguous, in respect of our own manual opera¬ 
tions; and doubtless also it is a matter of such ready 
inference in respect of many external phenomena as to 
do duty as a fact of observation in good faith; but doubt¬ 
less also there are many of these external phenomena 
that have to be somewhat painstakingly construed to 
bring them under the rule. Conceivably, even if such a 
habit of thought had not been handed down from the 
experience of handicraft it might have been induced 
by the discipline of the machine process, and might 
even have been ingrained in men exposed to this disci- 

1 “ Pragmatism ” is the term that has been elected to cover this meta¬ 
physical postulate of efficiency conceived as the bench mark of actuality. 


332 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


pline in sufficiently rigorous fashion to serve as a prime 
postulate of scientific inquiry; the machine process 
doubtless bears out such a principle in the main, and 
4*' very rigorously. But in point of historical fact it is 
quite unnecessary to suppose this principle of action 
by contact to be a product de now of the discipline of the 
machine, since it is older than the advent of the machine 
industry and is also quite consonant with the habits of 
work enforced by the technology of handicraft, more so 
indeed than with the technology of the machine indus¬ 
try. It appears fairly indubitable that this principle is 
a legacy taken over from the experience of life in the 
days of craftsmanship. And it may even be an open 
question whether the machine technology would not 
today be of an appreciably different complexion if it had, 
as it conceivably might have, developed without the 
hard and fast limitations imposed by this postulate. 
Doubtless, scientific inquiry, and the theoretical formu¬ 
lations reached by such inquiry, w T ould differ somewhat 
notably from what they currently are if the scientists 
had gone to their work without such a postulate, or hold¬ 
ing it in a qualified sense, as a principle of limited scope, 
as applying only within a limited range of phenomena, 
I's only so far as empirical evidence might enforce it in 
detail. 

If, as seems at least presumably true, this principle 
of action by contact owes its origin to habits induced by 
manipulation, it will be seen to be of an anthropomorphic 
derivation. And if it further owes its acceptance as a 
principle universally applicable to material phenomena 
to the protracted discipline of life under the technology 
of handicraft, its universality must also take rank as an 


The Machine Industry 


333 

anthropomorphic imputation enforced by long habit. 
It is of the nature of habit, and moreover of workman¬ 
like habit. Casting back into the past history of civili¬ 
sation and into the contemporary lower cultures, it will 
appear that the principle (habit of thought) in question 
is prevalent everywhere and presumably through all 
human time; as it should be if it is traceable to so ubiq¬ 
uitous an experience as manipulation. But it will also 
appear that, except within the bounds, in time and 
space, of the high tide of craftsmanship and the machine 
technology, this principle does not arrogate to itself 
universal mandatory authority in the domain of external 
phenomena. Not only are the tenets of magic and 
theology at variance with the proposition that action 
can take place only by mechanical contact; but in the 
naive thinking of commonplace humanity outside this 
machine-made Western civilisation, action at a distance 
is patently neither imbecile nor incomprehensible as a 
familiar trait of external objects in their everyday be¬ 
haviour. 

Nor is it by any means a grateful work of spontaneous 
predilection, all this mechanistic mutilation of objective 
reality into mere inert dimensions and resistance to 
pressure; as witness the widely prevalent revulsion, 
chronic or intermittent, against its acceptance as a final 
term of knowledge. Laymen seek respite in the fog of 
occult and esoteric faiths and cults, and so fall back on 
the will to believe things of which the senses transmit 
no evidence; while the learned and studious are, by 
stress of the same “aching void,” drawn into speculative 
tenets of ostensible knowledge that purport to go nearer 
to the; heart of reality, and that elude all mechanistic 


334 


The Instinct of Workmanship 

proof or disproof. This revulsion against thinking in 
uncoloured mechanistic terms alone runs suggestively 
parallel with that other revulsion, already spoken of, 
against the geometrically adjusted routine of conduct 
imposed on modern life by the machine process; the two 
are in great part coincident, or concomitant, both in 
point of the class of persons affected by each and in 
point of the uncertain measure of finality attending the 
move so made in either case. Neither the manner of 
life imposed by the machine process, nor the manner 
of thought inculcated by habituation to its logic, wall 
fall in with the free movement of the human spirit, 
born, as it is, to fit the conditions of savage life. So 
there comes an irrepressible—in a sense, congenital—* 
recrudescence of magic, occult science, telepathy, spirit¬ 
ualism, vitalism, pragmatism. 1 

1 Of all these latterday revulsionary schemes of surcease from the 
void and irritation of the mechanistic conception, that spoken for by 
M. H. Bergson is doubtless the most felicitous, at the same time that it 
is, in its elements, the most engagingly naive. Apart from, and without 
prejudice to, the (doubtless very substantial) merits of this system of 
speculative tenets, the vogue which it has achieved appears to be due 
in good part to its consonance with this archaic bent of civilised human 
nature, already spoken of. The immanent, or rather intrinsically domi¬ 
nant, creative bent inherent in matter and not objectively distinguishable 
from it, is sufficiently suggestive of that praeter-mechanical efficacy 
that seems so easy of comprehension to many of the peoples on the 
lower levels of culture, and that affords the substantial ground of magical 
practices and finds untroubled expression in the more naive of their 
theoretical speculations. It would be a work of extreme difficulty, e. g., 
to set up a consistently tenable distinction between M. Bergson’s elan 
de la vie , on the one hand, and the mana of the Melanesians (C/. Codring- 
ton, The Melanesians , esp. ch. vii and xii), the wakonda of the Sioux 
(C/. A. C. Fletcher and F. la Flesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” Bureau of 
Ethnology , Report xxvii (1905-1906), esp. pp. 597-599), or even the 
hamingia of Scandinavian paganism, on the other hand. 


The Machine Industry '335 

It was noted above that action by contact is not in¬ 
cluded, except by subsumption, in the mathematical 
formulations of technology or science. It should now y 

In fact, the point of departure and support for M. Bergson’s specula¬ 
tions appears to be nothing else than a projection, into objective reality, 
of the same human trait that has here been spoken of as the instinct of 
workmanship; this norm of initiative and efficiency which so is imposed 
on objective facts being then worked out with great subtlety and sym¬ 
pathetic insight, to make a comprehensive, cosmological scheme. The 
like projection of workmanlike initiative and efficiency, and its imputa¬ 
tion to objective reality, both at large—as with M. Bergson—and in 
concrete detail, with more or less of personalisation, is one of the main, 
though frequently misunderstood, factors in the cosmologies that do 
duty as a body of science and philosophy among savages and the lower 
barbarians. 

That the roots of this speculative scheme of “creative evolution” 
should reach so far into the background of human culture and draw on 
sources so close to the undisciplined prime-movers of human nature is, 
of course, in no degree derogatory to this system of theory; nor does it 
raise any presumption of unsoundness in the tenets that so are, in 
the course of elaboration, built up out of this metaphysical postulate. In 
point of fact, the characterisation here offered places M. Bergson’s thesis, 
and therefore his system, precisely where he has been at pains to explain 
that he wishes to take his initial position in advocating his view,—at an 
even break with the mechanistic conception; the merits of which, as 
contrasted with his own thesis, will then be made to appear in the course 
of the further argument that is to decide between their rival claims to 
primacy. In point of formal and provisional legitimation, such an im¬ 
putation of workmanlike efficacy at large rests on ground precisely even 
with that on which the mechanistic conception also rests,—viz. imputa¬ 
tion by force of metaphysical necessity, that is to say by force of an in¬ 
stinctive impulse. The main theorem of causation, as well as its several 
mechanistic corollaries, are, in the last resort, putative traits of matter 
only, not facts of observation; and the like is true—in M. Bergson’s 
jYTCiit admittedly so—of the clan de la vie as well. So far, therefore, 
as regards the formally determinable antecedent probability of the two 
rival conceptions, the one is as good as the other; but M. Bergson s argu- 
running on ground of circumstantial evidence in the main, makes 
out at least a cogently attractive likelihood that the conception for vhich 
he speaks is to be accepted as the more fundamental, underlying the 


336 The Instinct of Workmanship 

* 1 ^ 

be added that in all the concomitance and sequence with 
which the mathematical formulations of mechanical phe¬ 
nomena are occupied, the assumption of concomitance 
or sequence at a distance will fill the requirements of 
the formulae quite as convincingly and commonly more 
simply than the assumption of coficomitance by contact 
only. To realise the difficulties which beset this postulate 
of action by mechanical continuity solely, as well as the 
prima facie imbecility of the principle itself, it is only 
necessary to call to mind the tortuous theories of gravi¬ 
tation designed to keep it intact, and the prodigy of in¬ 
congruous intangibilities known as the ether,—a rigid 
and imponderable fluid. 

Associated with the principle of action by mechanical 
continuity alone is a second metaphysical postulate of 
science,—the conservation of energy, or persistence of 
quantity. Like its fellow it does not admit of empirical 
proof; yet it is likewise held to be of universal applica¬ 
tion. This principle, that the quantity of matter or of 
energy does not increase or diminish, or, perhaps better, 
that the quantity of mechanical fact at large is invariable, 
has a better presumptive claim to rank as a by-product 
of the machine technology; although such a claim could 
doubtless be allowed only with broad qualifications. 


mechanistic conception, conditioning it and on occasion overruling its 
findings in matters that lie beyond its ascertained competence. Which 
would come, in a different phrasing, to saying that the imputation of 
creatively workmanlike efficiency rests on instinctive ground more inde- 
feasibly intrinsic to human nature; presumably in virtue of its embody¬ 
ing the functioning of an instinctive proclivity less sophisticated and 
narrowed by special habituation, such special habituation, e. g., as that 
exercised by the technology of handicraft and the machine process io 
recent times. 


The Machine Industry 


337 


Not that the principle was not known or not formally 
accepted prior to the machine age; long ago the Roman 
scholar and the scholastic philosophers after him de¬ 
clared ex nihilo nihil , in nihilum nil posse reverti. But 
throughout the era of handicraft there continued also 
to be devoutly held the postulate that the material 
universe had a beginning in an act of creation, as also 
that it would some day come to an end, a quantitative 
collapse. As the era of handicraft advanced and, ap¬ 
parently, as the discipline of life under that technology 
enforced the habitual acceptance of the proposition that 
the quantity of material fact is constant, much ingenuity 
and much ambiguous speech was spent in an endeavour 
to reconcile the mechanical efficiency of the creative 
fiat with the dictum, ex nihilo nihil fit. But down to the 
close of that era it remains true that, by and large, the 
peoples of Christendom continued to believe in the 
mechanically creative efficiency of the Great Artificer; 
although, it must be admitted, with an ever growing 
apprehension that in this tenet of the faith they were 
face to face with a divine mystery. The eighteenth- 
century scientists, and many even in the nineteenth 
century, continued to profess belief in a creative origin 
of material things, as well as also in a providential guid¬ 
ance of material events,—which latter must have been 
conceived to be exerted by some other means than action 
through mechanical contact, since one term of the rela¬ 
tion was conceived not to be of a mechanical nature. ___ 
It is not until the machine age is well under way and 
the machine technology has come to occupy the land, 
that faith in the theorem of the conservation of energy 
has grown robust enough to let the scientists lose interest 


338 The Instinct of Workmanship, 

in all questions of creation. The tenet has died by neg¬ 
lect, not by confutation. That it has done so among 
the adepts of the material sciences, and that it is doing 
so among the lay population at large in the modern in¬ 
dustrial communities, is probably to be credited to the 
discipline of the machine process and the technological 
conceptions to which that discipline conduces. It con¬ 
duces to this outcome in more than one way. This 
modern technology is a technology of mechanical pro¬ 
cess; it looks to and takes care of a sequence of me¬ 
chanical action, rather than to the conditions of its 
inception or the sequel of its conclusion. A mind im¬ 
bued with the logic of this machine process does not 
by habitual proclivity or with incisive effect attend to 
these alien matters that have no meaning within the 
horizon of that logic. The creative augmentation of 
material objects is a matter lying without the scope of 
the machine’s logic. 

As has already been remarked, the principle (habit of 
thought) that the quantity of material fact is constant 
is necessarily of ancient derivation and long growth. 
Taken in a presumptive sense, and held loosely as a 
commonplace of experience, it must have come up and 
attained some force very early in the workmanlike ex¬ 
perience of the race. And the closer the application to 
the work in hand, the more consistently would this 
principle of common sense approve itself; so that it 
should, as indeed is sufficiently evident, be well at home 
among the habitual generalisations current in the days 
of handicraft; although it does not seem to have been 
generally accepted at that time as a principle necessarily 
having a universal application,—as witness the ready 


The Machine Industry 


339 


credence then given to theological dogmas of creation 
and the like. The habits of accountancy that came on 
under the price system, as the scope of the market grew 
larger with the growth and diversification of handicraft, 
seem to have had a great effect in extending and con¬ 
firming the habitual acceptance of such a theorem. A 
strict balance, a running equilibrium of the quantitative 
items involved, is the central fact of the accountant’s 
occupation. And this habit of scrutiny and balancing 
of quantities, and a meticulous tracing out and account¬ 
ing for any apparent excess or deficiency in the sums 
handled, pervades the community at large, though in a less 
pronounced fashion, as well as that fraction of the popula¬ 
tion employed in trade. The discipline of the handicraft 
system in this respect gains incontinently in scope and 
vigour as the growth of that technological system, with 
its characteristic business management, goes forward. 

When presently the machine technology comes for¬ 
ward this habitual preconception touching the invaria¬ 
bility of material quantity finds new applications and 
new refinements of application, with the outcome that 
its guidance of men’s thinking grows ever more inclusive 
and more peremptory. But it is not until half a century 
after the Industrial Revolution that the principle may be 
said finally to have gained unquestioning acceptance as 
a theorem universally binding on material phenomena. 
By that time—about the second quarter of the nine¬ 
teenth century—the unqualified validity of this theorem 
had become so unmitigated a matter of course as to have 
fairly shifted from the ground of empirical generalisation 
to that of metaphysical thesis. Men of science then 
quite ingenuously set about proving the law of the Con- 



340 ■ The Instinct of Workmanship 

i ‘ 

servation of Energy by appeal to experiments and rea¬ 
soning that proceeded with absolute naivete on the tacit 
assumption of the theorem to be proven. 

In its bearing on the growth of institutions the ma¬ 
chine technology has yet scarcely had time to make its 
mark. Such institutional factors as, e. g., the common 
law are necessarily of slow growth. A system of civil 
rights is not only a balanced scheme of habitual responses 
to those stimuli at whose impact they take effect; it is 
at the same time a scheme which has the sanction of 
avowed common consent, such as will express itself in 
rating these institutional elements as facts of imme¬ 
morial usage or as integrally inherent in the nature of 
things from the beginning. Such civil institutions take 
shape as prescriptive custom, and matters of habit which 
so are supported by broad grounds of authenticity and 
correlation with other elements of a prescriptive scheme 
of things will adapt themselves only tardily to any change 
in the situation or to any new bias in the drift of disci¬ 
pline. What happened in the matter of civil rights under 
the system of handicraft is an illustration in point. 
There need be little question but the eighteenth century 
scheme of Natural Rights was an outcome of the pro¬ 
tracted discipline characteristic of the era of handicraft, 
and an adaptation to the exigencies of daily life under 
that system. 

The scheme of Natural Rights, with its principles of 
Natural Liberty and its insistence on individual self- 
help, was well adapted to the requirements of handicraft 
and the petty trade, whose spirit it reflects with admir¬ 
able faithfulness. But it was of slow growth, as any 


The Machine Industry 


341 


scheme of institutions must be, in the nature of things. 
So much so that handicraft and the petty trade had 
been in effectual operation some half-a-dozen centuries, 
in ever increasing force, before the corresponding sys¬ 
tem of civil rights and moral obligations made good its 
pretensions to rule the economic affairs of the com¬ 
munity. Indeed, it is only by the latter half of the 
eighteenth century that the system of Natural Rights 
came to passable maturity and finally took rank as a 
secure principle of enlightened common sense; and by 
that time the handicraft system was giving way to the 
machine industry. And even then this result was reached 
only in the most advanced industrial community of 
Europe, where the discipline of handicraft and trade had 
had the freest scope to work out its natural bent, with 
the least hindrance from other dominant interests at 
variance with its schooling. 1 

So it has come about that while the system of Natural 
Rights is an institutional by-product of workmanship 
under the handicraft system and is adapted to the exi¬ 
gencies of craftsmanship and the petty trade, it never 
fully took effect in the shaping of institutions until that 
phase of economic life was substantially past, or until 

1 All this, of course, neither ignores nor denies the substantial part 
which the jus gentium and the 7 ms naturale of the Roman jurists and their 
commentators have played in the formulation of the system of Natural 
Rights. In point of pedigree the line of derivation of these legal principles 
is doubtless substantially as set forth authentically by the jurists who 
have spent their competent endeavors on that matter. So far as regards 
the English-speaking communities this pedigree runs back to Locke, and 
through Locke to the line of jurists and philosophers on whom that great 
scholar has drawn; while for the promulgation of the like system of prin¬ 
ciples more at large the names of Grotius, Pufendorf, Althusius, doubtless 
have all the significance commonly assigned them. See pp. 290-293 above. 


342 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


the new era, of the machine industry and the large 
business brought on by the new technology, had come 
to rule the economic situation. So that hitherto the 
work of the machine industry has been organised and 
conducted under a code of legal rights and business 
principles adapted to the state of the industrial arts 
which the machine industry has displaced. Latterly, it 
is true, the requirements of the machine technology, in 
the way of large-scale organisation, continuity of opera¬ 
tion, and interstitial balance of the industrial system, 
have begun to show themselves so patently at variance 
with these business principles engendered by the era of 
handicraft as to throw a shadow of doubt on the ade¬ 
quacy of these “Natural” metaphysics of natural liberty, 
self-help, free competition, individual initiative, and the 
like. But, harsh as has been the discrepancy between 
the received system of economic institutions on the one 
side and the working of the machine technology on the 
other, its effect in reshaping current habits of thought 
in these premises has hitherto come to nothing more 
definitive than an uneasy conviction that “Something 
will have to be done about it.” Indeed, so far is the 
machine process from having yet recast the principles 
of industrial management, as distinct from technological 
procedure, that the efforts inspired in responsible public 
officials and public-spirited citizens by this patent dis¬ 
crepancy have hitherto been directed wholly to regulat¬ 
ing industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme 
of business principles, rather than to take thought of 
how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution 
of livelihood in consonance with the technological re¬ 
quirements of the machine industry. 




The Machine Industry 


.343 


It is true, among the workmen, and particularly among 
those skilled workmen who have been trained in the 
machine technology and are exposed to the full impact 
of the machine’s discipline, uncritical habitual faith in 
this institutional scheme is beginning to crumble, so far 
as regards that principle of Natural Rights that vests 
unlimited discretion in the owner of property, and so 
far as regards property in the material equipment of 
industry. But this is about as broad a proposition of 
such a kind as current facts of opinion and agitation 
will bear out, and this inchoate break with the received 
habitual views touching the dues and obligations of 
discretion in industrial matters is extremely vague and 
almost wholly negative. Even in those members of the 
community who are most directly and rigorously ex¬ 
posed to its discipline the machine process has hitherto 
wrought no such definite bias, no such positive habitual 
attitude of workmanlike initiative towards the conven¬ 
tions of industrial management as to result in a con¬ 
structive deviation from the received principles. 1 

On the other hand the business principles engendered 
by the habit of mind that gave rise to the system of Na¬ 
tural Rights has had grave consequences for workman¬ 
ship under the conditions imposed by the machine in¬ 
dustry. As has been shown in some detail in the fore¬ 
going chapter, the individualistic organisation of the 
work, coupled with the personal incidence of the handi¬ 
craft technology, and the stress thrown on price-rating 
and self-help by the ever increasing recourse to bargain 
and sale (“free contract”) under that system, led in 

1 Unless the “Syndicalist” movement is to be taken as something 
sufficiently definite in its principles to make it an exception to the rule. 


344 


The Instinct of Workmanship 


the end to the habitual rating of workmanship in terms 
of the price it would bring. Then as always workmanlike 
efficiency commanded the approval of thoughtful men, 
as being serviceable to the common good and as a sub¬ 
stantial manifestation of human excellence; and at the 
same time, then as ever, efficient work was a source of 
comfort and complacency to the workman. But under 
the teaching of the price system efficiency came to be 
rated in terms of the pecuniary gain. 

With the advent of the machine industry this pe¬ 
cuniary rating of efficiency gained a new impetus and 
brought new consequences for technology as well as for 
business enterprise. Typically, the machine industry 
runs on a large scale, as contrasted with handicraft, and 
it involves a relatively wide and exacting division of 
labour between workmanship and salesmanship. Under 
the conditions of large ownership implied in this modern 
industrial system the workmen no longer have, or can 
have, the responsibility of the pecuniary management of 
the industrial concern; on the other hand the same con¬ 
ditions of large ownership and extensive business con¬ 
nections require the businessmen in charge to delegate 
the immediate oversight of the plant and its techno¬ 
logical processes to other hands, and to devote their own 
energies to the pecuniary management of the concern 
and its transactions. Hence it follows that as the ma¬ 
chine system and the highly specialised business enter¬ 
prise that goes with it reach a larger scale and a higher 
degree of elaboration the businessmen in charge are, 
by training and by progressive limitation of interest, 
less and less competent to take care of the technological 
exigencies of the machine system. But at the same 


f 


The Machine Industry 


345 


time the discretion in technological matters still rests 
in their hands by force of their ownership. So that, 
while the responsibility of technological discretion still 
rests on them, and cannot be fully delegated to other 
hands, the exigencies of business enterprise and of 
the training which it involves will no longer permit 
them to meet this responsibility in a competent fash¬ 
ion. 

The businessmen in control of large industrial enter¬ 
prises are beginning to appreciate something of their 
own unfitness to direct or oversee, or even to control, 
technological matters, and so they have, in a tentative 
way, taken to employing experts to do the work for them. 
Such experts are known colloquially as “ efficiency en¬ 
gineers” and are presumed to combine the qualifica¬ 
tions of technologist and accountant. In point of fact 
it is as accountants, capable of applying the tests of ac¬ 
countancy in a new field, that these experts commend 
themselves to the businessmen in control, and the “effi¬ 
ciency” which they look to is an efficiency counted in 
terms of net pecuniary gain. “Efficiency” in these 
premises means pecuniary efficiency, and only inciden¬ 
tally or in a subsidiary sense does it mean industrial 
efficiency,—only in so far as industrial efficiency con¬ 
duces to the largest net pecuniary gain. All the while 
the businessmen retain the decisive superior discretion 
in their own incompetent hands, since all the while the 
whole matter remains a business proposition. The 
“staff organisation,” in which vests the superior control 
of these technological affairs, consistently remains an 
organisation of worldly wisdom, business enterprise— 
not of technological proficiency,—a state of things not 


346 The Instinct of Workmanship 

\ >.>•- -a* 

to be remedied so long as industry is carried on for busi¬ 
ness profits. 

Meantime the workmen of all kinds and grades— 
labourers, mechanics, operatives, engineers, experts—all 
imbued with the same pecuniary principles of efficiency, 
go about their work with more than half an eye to the 
pecuniary advantage of what they have in hand. The 
attitude of the trades-unions towards their work and 
towards the industrial concerns in whose employ their 
work is done illustrates something of the habitual frame 
of mind of these men, who are avowed experts in the 
matter of workmanship. 

Latterly many inconveniences have. beset the com¬ 
munity at large as well as particular sections and classes 
of the industrial community, due in the main to a con¬ 
sistent adherence to these business principles in the 
management of industrial affairs. The capitalist-em¬ 
ployers, on the one hand, have gone on the full powers 
with which the modern institution of ownership and its 
broad implications has vested them; with the result that 
the public at large, investors, consumers of industrial 
products, users of “public utility” agencies serving such 
needs as light, fuel, transportation, communication, 
amusement, etc., feel very much aggrieved; as do 
also and more particularly the workmen with whom 
the capitalist-employers do business on the lines laid 
down by the authentic business principles involved in 
the discretionary ownership of the industrial plant and 
resources. On the other hand the workmen, resting their 
case on the same common-sense view that the individual 
is a self-sufficient economic unit who owes nothing to the 
community at large beyond what he may freely under- 


The Machine Industry - 347 

tr 

take “for a good and valuable consideration in hand 
paid,”—the workmen stand likewise on the full powers 
given them by the current institutions of ownership and 
contractual discretion, and so work what mischief they 
can to their employers and to the public at large, always 
blamelessly within the rules of the game as laid down 
of old on the pecuniary principles of business discretion, 
and in the light of such sense as their training has given 
them with regard to efficiency in the industries that have 
fallen into their hands. And then the “money power” 
comes in as a third pecuniarily trained factor, with ever 
increasing force and incisiveness, to muddle the whole 
situation mysteriously and irretrievably by looking after 
their own pecuniary interests in a fashion even more 
soberly legitimate and authentic, if possible, than the 
workmen’s management of their own affairs. 

Of course, all this working at cross purposes is not 
altogether due to trained incapacity on the part of the 
several contestants to appreciate the large and general 
requirements of the industrial situation; perhaps it is 
not even chiefly due to such inability, but rather to an 
habitual, and conventionally rightful, disregard of other 
than pecuniary considerations. It would doubtless ap¬ 
pear that a trained inability to apprehend any other than 
the immediate pecuniary bearing of their manoeuvres 
accounts for a larger share in the conduct of the business¬ 
men who control industrial affairs than it does in that 
of their workmen, since the habitual employment of 
the former holds them more rigorously and consistently 
to the pecuniary valuation of whatever passes under 
their hands; and the like should be true only in a higher 
degree of those who have to do exclusively with thQ 


348 The Instinct of Workmanship 

financial side of business. The state of the industrial 
arts requires that these several factors should cooperate 
intelligently and without reservation, with an eye single 
to the exigencies of this modern wide-sweeping tech¬ 
nological system; but their habitual addiction to pe¬ 
cuniary rather than technological standards and con¬ 
siderations leaves them working at cross purposes. So 
also their (pecuniary) interests are at cross purposes; 
and since these interests necessarily rule in any pecuniary 
culture, they must decide the line of conduct for each 
of the several factors engaged. 

These discrepancies, obstructive tactics and disser- 
viceable practices are commonly deplored and are pre¬ 
sumably deplorable, and they doubtless merit extensive 
discussion on these grounds, but their merits in this 
bearing do not properly come into consideration here. 
The matter has been brought in here not with any view 
of defence, denunciation or remedy, but because it is a 
matter of grave consequence as regards the training given 
by business experience to these men in whose hands the 
current scheme of institutions has placed the techno¬ 
logical fortunes of the community. And whether these 
pecuniary tactics and practices that fill so large a place 
in the attention and sentiments of this generation come 
chiefly of a lack of insight into current technological 
exigencies, or of a deliberate choice of evils enforced by 
the pecuniary necessities of the case, still their disci¬ 
plinary value as bearing on the sense of workmanship 
taken in its larger scope will be much the same in either 
case. Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive 
principles of business necessarily brings it about that 
pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) 


The Machine mhustry 


349 


. * V* 

the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equip¬ 
ment and products come to be rated on a scale of money 
values, which has only a circuitous and often only a puta¬ 
tive relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their 
serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes 
that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed 
valuable and commendable,—the accepted test of suc¬ 
cess, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. 
Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, 
until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to 
serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is 
accepted as the measure of productiveness. 

Efficiency conduces to the common good, and is also 
a meritorious and commendable trait in the person who 
exercises it. But under the canons of self-help and pe¬ 
cuniary valuation the test of efficiency in economic 
matters has come to be, not technological mastery and 
productive effect, but proficiency in pecuniary manage¬ 
ment and the acquisition of wealth. Both in his own 
estimation and in the eyes of his fellows, the man who 
gains much does well; he is conceived to do well both as 
a matter of personal efficiency and in point of servicea¬ 
bility to the common good. To “do well” in modern 
phrase means to engross something appreciably more of 
the community’s wealth than falls to the common run. 
But since gains, and hence efficiency, are conceived in 
terms of price, it follows that the man, workman or 
businessman, who can induce his fellows to pay him well 
for his services or his goods is accounted efficient and 
serviceable; from which it follows that under this canon 
of pecuniary efficiency men are conceived to serve the 
/common good somewhat in proportion as they are able 


35o 


The Instinct of Workmanship 

to induce the community to pay more for their services 
than they are worth. 

The businessman who gains much at little cost, who 
gets something for nothing, is rated, in his own as well 
as in his neighbours’ esteem, as a public benefactor indis¬ 
pensable to the community’s welfare, and as contribut¬ 
ing to the common good in direct proportion to the 
amount which he has been able to draw out of the aggre¬ 
gate product. It is perhaps needless to call to mind that 
of this character are the main facts in the history of all 
the great fortunes; 1 although the current accounts of 
their accumulation, being governed by pecuniary stand¬ 
ards of efficiency and serviceability, dwell mainly on the 
services that have inured to the community from the 
traffic with which the great captains have interfered in 
their quest of gain. The prevalence of salesmanship, that 
is to say of business enterprise, and the consequent high 
repute of the salesmanlike activities and aptitudes in 
any community that is organised on a price system, is 
perhaps the most serious obstacle which the pecuniary 
culture opposes to the advance in workmanship. It 
intrudes into the most intimate and secret workings 
of the human spirit and contaminates the sense of work¬ 
manship in its initial move, and sets both the proclivity 
to efficient work and the penchant for serviceability at 
cross purposes with the common good. 

But under the conditions engendered by the machine 
technology the scope of this pecuniary standard of work¬ 
manship has been greatly enlarged. On the whole the 

1 Cf., e. g., Anna Youngman, The Economic Causes of Great Fortunes, 
especially ch. vi; R. Ehrenberg, Grosse Vermdgen; Ida Tarbell, History 
of the Standard Oil Company . 



The Machine Industry 


■V-'. 


351 


machine industry calls for a large-scale organisation, 
increasingly so as time has passed and the machine pro¬ 
cess has come more fully to dominate the industrial 
situation. By the same move initiative and discretion 
have come to vest in those who can claim ownership of 
the large material equipment so required, and the exer¬ 
cise of such initiative and discretion by these owners is 
loosely proportioned to the magnitude of their holdings. 
Smaller owners have the same freedom of initiative and 
discretion, in point of legal and conventional compe¬ 
tency,—such freedom and equality between persons 
being of the essence of Natural Rights; but in point of 
practical fact, as determined by technological and busi¬ 
ness exigencies, there is but small discretion left such 
smaller holders. Initiative and discretion in modern 
industrial matters vest in the owners of the industrial 
plant, or in such moneyed concerns as may stand in an 
underwriting relation to the owners of the plant; such 
discretion is exercised through pecuniary transactions; 
and these pecuniary transactions whereby the conduct 
of industry is guided and controlled are entered into 
with a view to gain in terms of price. It is but a slight 
exaggeration to say that such transactions, which govern 
the course of industry, are carried out with an eye single 
to pecuniary gain,—the industrial consequences, and 
their bearing on the community’s welfare, being matters 
incidental to the transaction of business. In every-day 
phrase, under the rule of the current technology and 
business principles, industry is managed by businessmen 
for business ends, not by technological experts or for 
the material advantage of the community. And in this 
control of industrial affairs the smaller businessmen 


352 The Instinct of Workmanship 

are in great part subject to the discretion of the 
larger. 1 

By ancient habit, handed down from the days of 
handicraft and petty trade, this pecuniary management 
is conventionally conceived to be directed to the produc¬ 
tion of goods and services, and the businessman is still 
conventionally rated as a producer and his gains ac¬ 
cepted as a measure of his productive efficiency. In 
conventional speech “producer” means the owner of 
industrial plant, not the workmen employed nor the 
mechanical apparatus about which they are employed. 2 
The “producers,” “manufacturers,” “captains of in¬ 
dustry,” whose interests are safeguarded by current 
legislation and by the guardians of law and order are the 
businessmen who have a pecuniary interest in industrial 
affairs; and it is their pecuniary interests that are so 
safeguarded, in the naive faith that the material interests 
of the community at large coincide with the opportuni¬ 
ties for gain so secured to the businessmen. 

It has already been spoken of above that the processes 
of industry are bound in a comprehensive system of give 
and take, in such a manner that no considerable fraction 
of this industrial system functions independently of the 
rest. The industrial system at large may be conceived 

1 Cf. a paper “On the Nature of Capital” in the Quarterly Journal of 
Economics , November, 1908. 

2 As late as Adam Smith’s time “manufacturer” still retained its 
etymological value and designated the workman who made the goods. 
But from about that time, that is to say since the machine process and 
the business control of industry have thoroughly taken effect, the term 
no longer has a technological connotation but has taken on a pecuniary 
(business) signification wholly; so that the term now designates a business¬ 
man who stands in none but a pecuniary relation to the processes of in¬ 
dustry. 


The Machine Industry 


353 


as a comprehensive machine process, the several sub¬ 
processes of which technologically inosculate and ramify 
in what may be conceived as a network of elements work¬ 
ing in a moving equilibrium, none of which can go on 
at its full productive efficiency except in duly balanced 
correlation with all the rest. This characterisation will 
strictly apply only so far as the machine technology has 
taken over the various branches of industry, but it ap¬ 
plies in a loose though by no means idle fashion also as 
regards those elements of the industrial system in which 
the machine technology has not yet become dominant. 
In so far as the industrial system is of this character 
it will also hold that the business management of any 
one branch or line or parcel of industries will have its 
effect on the rest, primarily and proximately on those 
other branches or lines with which the given parcel stands 
in immediate relations of give and take, through the 
market or more directly through technological correla¬ 
tion,—as, e. g., in the transportation system. Business 
management which affects a large section of this bal¬ 
anced system will necessarily have a wide-reaching effect 
on the working of the system at large. Such business 
control of industry, as has just been remarked above, 
is exercised with a view to pecuniary gain; but pecuniary 
gain in these premises comes from changes, and appre¬ 
hended changes, in the efficiency of the various industrial 
processes that are touched by such control, rather than 
from the work-day functioning of the several items of 
equipment involved. The changes which so bring gain 
to these larger businessmen may be favourable to the 
effective working of industry, but they may also be un¬ 
favourable; and the opportunities for gain which they 


354 The Instinct of Workmanship ' 

afford the larger businessmen may be equally profitable 
whether the disturbance in question is favourable or un¬ 
favourable to industrial efficiency. The gains to be de¬ 
rived from such disturbance are proportioned to the 
magnitude of the disturbance rather than to its industrial 
productiveness. It should follow, of course, that if the 
machine technology should come so to dominate the 
industrial situation as to bind all industry in a rigor¬ 
ously comprehensive balanced process, the material 
fortunes of the community would come to rest un¬ 
reservedly and in all details in the hands of those 
larger businessmen who hold the final pecuniary dis¬ 
cretion. 

In qualification of this broad proposition it is to be 
noted that, while the gains of the superior rank of busi¬ 
nessmen accrue in the manner indicated,—by means of 
disturbances which may indifferently be favourable or 
unfavourable to industry,—yet in the long run it is neces¬ 
sarily true that the gains which so inure to the pecuniary 
magnates must be derived from the net product of in¬ 
dustry and will in the long run be larger in the aggregate 
the more productive the community’s industry is. What 
makes business profitable to the businessmen is, after 
all, their usufruct of the community’s industrial effi¬ 
ciency. In the long run nothing can accrue as income 
to the pecuniary magnates more than the surplus product 
of industry above the subsistence of the industrial com¬ 
munity at large. But so long as the magnates have not 
come to a working arrangement on this basis and “ pooled 
their interests” the proposition as formulated above 
appears to be adequate to the facts,—that the gains of 
these larger businessmen are a function of the magni- 


The Machine Industry 


«^ 


355 


tude of the disturbances which they create rather than 
of their productive effect. 

It should also follow, and so far as the above charac¬ 
terisation holds it does follow, that the current pecuniary 
organisation of industry vests the usufruct of the com¬ 
munity’s industrial proficiency in the owners of the 
industrial equipment. Proximately this usufruct of the 
industrial community’s technological knowledge and 
working capacity vests in the detail owners of the equip¬ 
ment, but only proximately. At the further remove it 
vests only in the businessmen whose command of large 
means enables them to create and control those pecuniary 
conjunctures of industry that bring about changes in 
the market value and ownership of the equipment. 


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